Drawing on a vast quantity of unexplored archival materials, Deborah reconstructs the texture of Emily Brontë's days, bringing us closer to one of the greatest and fiercest writers we have, by showing us her creative process and her confidence in her strange art.

This book has much to reveal to readers of Wuthering Heights, as we accompany Emily around the wild moorlands she loved so much. Also threaded through with the contemporary politics and events of the era (from the early labour movements of the Chartists and reformists, to the slave uprisings in the colonies), and authors and locals that Emily read about or knew (from proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft to the masculine lesbian Anne Lister).

Featuring illuminating readings of her poems, This Dark Night takes us inside the world of Emily's irrepressible spirit and wild imagination.

Atmospheric and empathetic rather than revelatory, Lutz goes beyond recording events and facts to immerse readers in Brontë’s way of seeing the world, where imagination and the moorland landscape merge into one continuous vision.

A thoughtful, imaginative portrait that brings fresh interpretation to familiar ground.

Lo esencial para aficionarse a la lectura es tener la inquietud de adentrarse en mundos y experiencias diferentes y, por lo general, es más satisfactorio que los libros elegidos sean resultado de una búsqueda intuitiva antes que de una recomendación. Por pura casualidad, el primer libro que -inapropiadamente- recuerdo haber leído de muy niño fue Cumbres borrascosas. El espíritu atormentado de Heathcliff, junto al carácter caprichoso de Catherine, y el áspero y desabrido paisaje en que se desarrolla la acción me impresionaron tanto que llegué a sentir como las palabras de Emily Brontë despertaban en mí confusas -y a veces terroríficas- emociones. Aunque en mi librería desentona un poco junto a La isla del tesoro o Cinco semanas en globo, sigue siendo uno de mis libros preferidos. (Manuel Sánchez Ledesma) (Translation)

En Cumbres Borrascosas, al convertir a Isabella en una sumisa que da su consentimiento, Fennell da a entender que las acciones de Heathcliff, aunque siguen siendo perversas, resultan más fáciles de digerir para el público al hacer que su comportamiento parezca menos monstruoso… E incluso sexy. Andrea García-Santesmases Fernández considera que la película utiliza el consentimiento para validar un tipo de relación que de otra manera resultaría deleznable. “No se trata solo de un juego sexual puntual, sino que desde el primer momento Heathcliff le dice a Isabella que la va a humillar, que la va a utilizar, que la va a degradar. Estas amenazas parecieran diluirse porque las acompaña de un ‘¿te parece bien?’ a lo que ella contesta ‘sí’. De la misma manera, cuando la vemos atada con una correa, a cuatro patas, en medio de la inmundicia, viviendo literalmente como una perra, la violencia de la imagen se suaviza porque ella da a entender que eso es lo que quiere”, asegura.

Para la sexóloga, el problema está en situar el consentimiento como una validación no solo legal, sino ética, e incluso, política, de una relación. “Lo que acontece entre ambos no es un delito ya que ha sido acordado entre dos adultos, pero eso no quiere decir que esté bien, ni mucho menos que sea una expresión de empoderamiento femenino o de libertad sexual. En este sentido, es interesante señalar que en el libro de Cumbres Borrascosas no aparece esta alusión repetida al consentimiento por lo que se trata de una estrategia contemporánea para validar narrativas problemáticas”, advierte. (Marita Alonso) (Translation)

“It’s really hard to get at who Emily Brontë was,” biographer Deborah Lutz remarks, “but also interesting because it is challenging.” In This Dark Night: Emily Brontë, A Life, Lutz approaches the enigma of the “weird, strange, difficult, mysterious person” who created the monumental Wuthering Heights. For Lutz, who is a professor of 19th-century English and American literature at Penn State, this aura of mystery makes Emily the “most fascinating Brontë.” Using recently discovered poetry manuscripts and focusing closely on Emily’s day-to-day life, Lutz creates an unforgettable portrait of a multitalented genius. [...]

Similarly, in This Dark Night, Lutz wanted to reconstruct the bodily experience of Emily, “how her body felt, what she smelled, what she heard, how cold she was, what kind of clothing she wore, [even] where she went to the bathroom,” she tells BookPage. Lutz’s research thus included walks on the treeless moors surrounding the family’s Haworth home, where the birdsong and fierce wind mirror what Lutz sees as Emily’s “inner wildness.” Lutz thinks of her as a “capital R” Romantic writer, like Lord Byron and William Wordsworth, poets Emily loved who yearned for immersion of the human self in the larger natural world. In Brontë’s case, her love of nature also included observations of how the Industrial Revolution, particularly mining, was altering her beloved moors. [...]

A chief pleasure of This Dark Night is Lutz’s analysis of the drawings found in Brontë’s notebooks and marginalia, some of which are included in the biography. Her letters, poems and manuscripts are adorned with doodles that hint at the author’s personality. Some of these communicate “humor and lightness”: A silly drawing accompanying a somber poem indicates Brontë’s “refusal to grow up and her resistance to writerly rules.” A sketch of a gnarled tree reinforces her “devotion to the unreclaimed, uncultivated and scarred.” But she also doodled horrific little depictions of violent scenarios: decapitations, bludgeonings, piles of corpses. The gothic novels and stories Emily was reading at the time were redolent with violence, rape, flagellation and other gruesome and unsavory acts. These elements of her imagination emerge in the domestic and sexual violence depicted in her novel. As they say: Wuthering Heights is not a love story.

Brontë was not a violent person, but she “wasn’t always the kind of person we would approve of today,” Lutz explains. She was “a misanthropic person . . . she didn’t always like other people, and part of that misanthropy comes out in [imagining acts of] sadism.” She prized solitude and liked dogs more than she liked people. She desired to lose herself in the natural world, as in her poem “I’m happiest when most away,” which imagines her “spirit wandering wide / through infinite immensity.” Lutz notes how many of Brontë’s poems imagine scenes of a lover weeping at the graveside of their beloved, as Heathcliff does over Catherine’s grave. Catherine’s dream of being flung out from heaven onto the heath of Wuthering Heights, where she “woke sobbing for joy,” exemplifies her desire to haunt the Earth. Perhaps, Lutz suggests, Brontë’s vision of an earthly afterlife is a form of grief, a way of finding her own mother’s ghost wandering the moonlit moors. By “excavat[ing] the undergloom,” Lutz writes, Emily penned “her great novel about the heights that owe everything to the lowlands and the dead.”

When I ask Lutz how she feels about Emerald Fennell’s controversial film adaptation of Wuthering Heights, she diplomatically responds, “I’m glad that the movie has caused people to read the novel.” Her own favorite work based on Wuthering Heights comes from Anne Carson, whose 1994 poem “The Glass Essay” reflects on Brontë’s character as a “whacher.” As Lutz explains in This Dark Night, “whacher” was Brontë’s preferred spelling for “watcher,” as in someone who is primarily an observer of life. “Whacher is what she was,” Carson writes. “She whached God and humans and moor wind and open night. / She whached eyes, stars, inside, outside, actual weather.” Lutz’s own close observations of this weird, “whachful” and wonderful Brontë illuminate the author like never before. (Catherine Hollis)

A world away from the characters he’s often inhabited – whether laying on the sneer as Captain Flint in Starz’s pirate caper Black Sails or the smirk as Rochester in 2006’s Jane Eyre – he is open and likeable, warmth radiating from him in waves. Not a curled lip in sight. Then there’s his laugh: big and sonorous, the only one I’ve encountered that can unironically be described as a guffaw. (Patrick Smith)

Emily Brontë Reappraised

Sat 09 May, 4:00 pm–5:00 pm

Attic, Lawrence Batley Theatre, Queen Street HD1 2SP 

Join Claire O’Callaghan & Dr Michael Stewart as they dismantle the myths that have long obscured Emily Brontë’s life and art.

Emily Brontë is one of our best-known writers, but also one of the most enigmatic. Her only novel, Wuthering Heights, has been adapted across all media forms. The latest film adaptation, directed by Emerald Fennell, and starring Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie, is yet another interpretation.

Dr Claire O’Callaghan’s Emily Brontë Reappraised – the only new biography of Emily to be published during the last 20 years – brings new insight into how we read and remember one of literature’s most enigmatic writers. It has just been re-published in a new expanded form.

Join Claire and fellow Brontë expert Dr Michael Stewart as they dismantle the myths that have long obscured Emily Brontë’s life and art, revealing a bold, passionate, and politically attuned writer whose work still resonates today. Rediscover Emily Brontë for our times.