In her new biography of the unknowable Emily, This Dark Night, Deborah Lutz doesn’t commit the prime biographical sin of trying to make Brontë too easy to understand or relate to. Instead, she asks more questions than she answers.

For this reason, while some readers may be frustrated by the paucity of new facts or explanations for why Emily was the way she was, for others (including this reader) this vagueness is the very reason for the book’s success. Weighing in at a mere 264 pages (before notes), This Dark Night is not the door-stopper that habitual readers of biography might be used to. The fact of the matter is that Brontë didn’t live very long (she died of tuberculosis at age 30), and very few traces of her short life remain. Much of what we “learn” here is speculation, gleaned from the poetry, prose, and fragments of writing—sometimes literal scraps as well as minuscule productions that Lutz calls “paper crafts”—that she left behind. [...]

Hedging language (such as would and may) predominates here, as Lutz tells us what life in the parsonage was like and describes Emily’s day-to-day tasks, which included “turning” clothes (reversing and restitching them so the less-worn sides faced outward), peeling potatoes, and feeding the dogs, as well as her role in the famous imaginative worlds of the Brontë siblings.

Lutz also has to rely on this hedging language when exploring Emily’s intellectual formation in these years. She makes the assumption that the Brontës’ mother, Maria, had “bluestocking ways” and likely read Mary Wollstonecraft based on her membership in various lending libraries, including the Penzance Ladies Book Club, which seems a little too easy, but otherwise sticks to what we can reasonably know or assume. She tells us about Emily’s attendance at church; her time spent in Keighley, where she borrowed books; and her famous wanderings on the moors with her siblings and her mastiff mix, Keeper. 

To that end, Lutz wisely keeps out of the debate surrounding what Emily may or may not have done to get sent away to school at age 17. Emily and the other Brontës, Lutz reminds us, had a social existence in Haworth and in Yorkshire more generally. They weren’t, as is often depicted, merely hermits living alone on the heath.

The mythology of Emily as a free-range “moor nymph” was partly started by Charlotte in her editor’s preface to the posthumous second edition of Wuthering Heights. In her grief, and perhaps also because of an inability to communicate what Emily was really like, Charlotte depicted her genius sister as a kind of feral savant—a “native and nursling of the moors,” as she put it—who was somehow otherworldly.

Lutz seeks to remind us that this was not the case by returning Emily to the domestic sphere as well as the “wild workshop” of West Yorkshire that she loved so much. Her Emily is not some weird sprite haunting the landscape, but something even stranger: a real woman. [...]

The point is not to bring Emily Brontë down to earth by claiming (as the 2019 show Dickinson did to that later Emily) that she was just like us, all anachronistic feelings and hidden Sapphic longings, but to bring her down to an earth that was uniquely hers. Lutz’s book does just that. Her Emily is a thrillingly earthbound creature, as individual and ultimately as inaccessible as we all are. To think we know her or understand her would be reductive. But to realize that we don’t fully know or understand her is to realize that she is just like us.

After reading This Dark Night, I don’t feel like I really know Emily Brontë any better, but I do think I understand her world a bit better—her terroir, the environment she was steeped in and that infuses her verse and prose. Lutz does not try to explain Emily—rather, she leaves her where she wanted to be, on her own. Lutz doesn’t make her do anything; instead, she wonders often about how Emily might have found her eventual role as the keeper of the Haworth parsonage, but she is careful not to put words in her subject’s mouth.

We don’t learn much that’s new about Emily herself, but we do learn what it would have been like to be in her world. Anyone looking for easy answers to Wuthering Heights, a brutal and confusing book, or its strange author will be disappointed—but those readers for whom the mystery is the point will certainly be pleased. (Sarah Chihaya)

If you see one adaptation of Wuthering Heights made in 2026, do yourself a favour and make it Becca Hirani’s.

Based on the title, the trailer and even the opening scenes, you would be forgiven for thinking that this was something in the vein of Pride And Prejudice And Zombies, but this is no mere pastiche, and neither does it waste time licking the wallpaper. Yes, it’s over the top, but so was the love of which Emily Brontë wrote. There’s a lot of blood, and not just from childbirth, but this seems a fitting way to acknowledge the very real – and often mundane – brutality underlying the novel. All Hirani has done is to turn up the volume on what was already there.

She makes just one major adjustment. Here, though Cathy has still succumbed to the same fate, Heathcliff has refused to fade conveniently out of the narrative. Even in 1832, and certainly by 2026, minoritised people have been doing that for long enough. Here, it is a living man who meets Cathy’s ghost upon the moor, and rather than becoming like her, he strives to make her like him again.

Enter Mr. Lockwood (Ross Townsend-Green), the earnest gentleman to whom the original tale was told, riding across the moors on his white horse, Harper. With his dapper clothing and anxious manners, he is the perfect archetype of the polite bystander in a Jane Austen adaptation, a man who has spent his whole life surrounded by people who think and behave in the same way that he does. In Wuthering Heights, he is a fish out of water. His first encounter with Heathcliff (Sky Cheema) is a tangle of faux pas, and yet he experiences some kind of fascination that makes him feel compelled to go back a second time. The precise nature of this is unclear. Perhaps it really is all about his notion of proper behaviour. Perhaps there is a dark kind of magic at work, or perhaps it is something that he would find it even harder to countenance.

Next to Lockwood, Heathcliff looks as if he belongs to a different different kind of film, but perhaps he always belonged not just to a different culture but to a different genre, breaking into the book as he did when, so far as English Gothic readers of the time understood things, he had no right to be there. This is only the second time he has been played as a racially marginalised person (after Andrea Arnold’s 2011 version), and this is probably the closest he has looked to Brontë’s intention, but equally important is Cheema’s ability to fully inhabit the character, giving him both the physical power and the weight of charisma that the role demands. In flashback scenes and in Lockwood’s strange hallucinatory glimpses of the past, we see him as the unwanted, sometimes overtly abused outsider, but we also see him able to approach the world on his own terms. They say the best revenge is living well, but for those who have empathised with his plight over the decades, seeing him get a bit of actual revenge is pretty satisfying.

Again, this doesn’t so much stray from the plot as enlarge it and explore a particular set of interpretations. Opening on a dark and stormy night, Hirani makes it clear that she feels no obligation to tread lightly. This is the Gothic writ large. Like Mārama, it’s full of fury at racial injustice and the violence inherent in the class system. In giving Heathcliff space to be all of himself without the constraints of that system, it also creates space for Cathy. Elle O’Hara portrays her as someone simply too big for the world in which she is trapped. In the few moments that she she and Cheema share the screen, other characters become irrelevant, painfully aware of their own lack of purpose. Only Nelly (Nicola Wright) seems to retain a sense of herself – a narrator’s duty, even if she only occasionally gets to tell tales here. This is, in the end, a love story, and we have to believe in that to engage with it fully, to root for love when it and madness become one.

Townsend-Green deserves praise for navigating all this as a man who seems, at first, to be a figure of fun, prim and ineffectual, reminiscent in some ways of poor Sergeant Howie in The Wicker Man. Kept at the centre of things, though bitterly aware of his own lack of control, Lockwood finds his body wracked by fever as he is haunted and confounded by the many ghosts of the troubled house. At night, the windows rattle. Candles fail to behave as they usually do onscreen, and offer only small pools of light. Cathy, in a ragged grey dress, is never far away from him, and each glimpse brings him terror. It’s a hard-hearted viewer who won’t root for him too, or sympathise with his efforts to stand up for justice – even if some understand that the context of systemic oppression makes that far from simple.

The young heroes of An American Werewolf In London once assured us that Heathcliff didn’t howl, but here that doesn’t seem out of the question. Gently skirting the edge of comedy, of camp, Hirani’s film will delight and appal in equal measure, but all of it deservedly. (Jennie Kermode)

Jack : Did you hear that?

David : I heard that.

Jack : What was it?

David : Could be a lot of things.

Jack : Yeah?

David : A coyote.

Jack : There aren't any coyotes in England.

David : The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Jack : Pecos Bill.

David : Heathcliff.

Jack : Heathcliff didn't howl!

David : No, but he was on the moors.