6. Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre is a quintessential autumnal/winter read; with it’s windswept moors and candlelit rooms, it is the perfect novel for a moody winters evening. The novel follows the protagonist Jane and her battle to find independence and escape her childhood troubles. Touching on social inequality, morality, and Victorian gender ideals, the Gothic and Romantic elements of the novel make it an unforgettable and poignant read- particularly for those interested in classical literature. (Evie Bettison)

It has been a busy year for Emily Brontë’s admirers, with Deborah Lutz’s new biography This Dark Night: Emily Brontë, a Life appearing alongside a rather different sort of Brontë revival on-screen. Though Brontë has never lacked interpreters, she presents them with a special problem: there is so very little to recover of her life and so very much that has been made of what remains. Brontë began writing Wuthering Heights (1847) at 27 and died three years later, having produced no other novel. The disproportion between the brevity of her life and the scale of that great, unfathomable work has made her one of literature’s most beguiling apparitions.

Emily Dickinson called Wuthering Heights “electric” and its author “gigantic,” requesting that Brontë’s 1846 poem “No Coward Soul Is Mine” be read at her funeral. Virginia Woolf, too, treated Brontë as a writer of almost supernatural force. The mystique surrounding the latter extends beyond her writing to her person, earning her the dubious honor of “patron saint of difficult women.” Lutz’s new biography attempts to bring the reality of Emily Brontë into view without quite dimming that mythical shine, a tricky needle to thread and one she executes admirably.

Lutz fleshes out the author’s life through manuscripts, marginalia, drawings, and diaries, building her chapters around a chronology of Brontë family life and crowning each with an epigraph from Emily Brontë’s poems. Lutz’s is a tactile approach, in keeping with her previous work The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects (2015). She gives us Brontë in all her strangeness, appearing mostly uninterested in turning her subject into a proto-anything: “Above all,” she declares, “I treat Emily Brontë as a masterful writer […] a consummate artist who developed her genius quickly.” Lutz accepts that Brontë emerges in her pages as a “mythic figure” but hopes that readers will also glimpse her “sewing, peeling potatoes, sitting at an open window, and picking up her pencil.” [...]

The biography, inevitably, is a family portrait. There is a tendency in popular accounts of Emily and Charlotte to cast the sisters as opposites: Charlotte practical and conventional, intent on taming Emily’s wild genius or otherwise standing in for the ordinary world against which she rebelled. Lutz occasionally invokes this contrast but for the most part offers a useful corrective. The Brontë children, seen from another angle, were more alike than not: they shared literary ambitions, reading habits, imaginary worlds, and an almost unimaginable work ethic. And they shared a lifelong habit of returning always to their childhood. [...]

That Wuthering Heights has become synonymous with epic romance is a strange quirk of literary history. Dante Gabriel Rossetti came close to the truth when he labeled it “a fiend of a book—an incredible monster,” musing that “the action is laid in Hell—only it seems places & people have English names there.” Charlotte seemed unnerved by the novel’s raw power. She performed a canny act of PR in her preface to its later editions, seeking to account for the sheer amorality of the work: “Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is,” she concedes. “But this I know: the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master—something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself.” Charlotte goes on to mythologize her late sister, who had died of tuberculosis almost exactly a year after the book’s publication, as a kind of noble savage not entirely in control of her own artistic daemon: “Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, [Emily’s] nature stood alone.”

It is easy to see why one might wish to distance oneself from the novel. Wuthering Heights is not a love story in any conventional sense. Cathy and Heathcliff are not star-crossed lovers so much as twin souls locked in spiritual warfare, seeking almost to annihilate themselves in a bid for impossible unity. (Recall Cathy’s famous line, “I am Heathcliff!”) Their passion is quasi-religious, existing outside of ordinary time and flesh, defying death; explicit sex barely features in the novel. Elizabeth Hardwick dubbed it “a virgin’s story” for its spectral and not-entirely-of-this-world quality.

The novel’s baffling singularity—its frankly unchristian sensibility—left many of its early readers at a loss. The Spectator called it “coarse,” while it was deemed “too gloomy, savage, and eccentric” by other critics. “How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery” pronounced Graham’s Magazine. A reviewer for Britannia, in contrast, commended the novel’s “considerable power” and “savage grandeur.” These reviews were later found in Emily’s desk, evidence that she had read them, though what she made of the judgments is another matter. [...]

Biography usually promises to demystify its subjects, but Lutz shows how contexts can accumulate around a mysterious figure without quite explaining her subject away. We can learn what Emily Brontë read, where she walked, and which animals she loved; we can reconstruct with cautious confidence the world from which Wuthering Heights emerged. And yet the novel remains: no less strange for all we can know of its making, no less an “incredible monster” for all we now know of its maker. (Anna Ballan)