Both Emily Brontë and her only novel Wuthering Heights have been called “deranged”, “crazed” or (especially online, in the wake of the recent film) “unhinged”. So it’s a relief to read a biography where she comes across, instead, as more grounded, steady, sane. Deborah Lutz, whose 2015 book The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects made such an impression, anchors her narrative in solid things: the too-short bed Emily squeezed herself into; the pockets she stuffed with paper, pencils and moorland treasures; the laundry she looked after, including stockings with “AB5” sewn into them to indicate they were her sister Anne’s fifth pair. Lutz’s Emily is an eminently practical woman who wrote “while baking, in front of a peat fire perched on a little stool, or while walking” and who “used the tactile keeping of order as a prop and prompt to lose herself in the sublimity of art-making and moor-haunting”.

For Lutz, Emily’s writing is also “tactile”. She counts the sampler Emily made at 10 as one of her “earliest extant writings”, and while other scholars have dismissed it as a collection of copied platitudes, Lutz notices that one line Emily stitched, from Proverbs – “Who hath gathered the wind in his fists?” – suggests that maybe she was already thinking about wuthering. She lovingly describes the little books the Brontë children made as “delightful, tiny objects to match their toys and still-small selves, texts holding secretive and insular qualities”. She calls the one-page diaries Emily made with Anne “a new writing practice, one that feels distinctly modern, even avant garde”, as they crammed in descriptions of their cooking, their chatter, their animals, their made-up heroines; stream of consciousness nearly a century before Virginia Woolf.

The wilder stories get an airing too, but Lutz doesn’t sensationalise them, or make them the key to everything; she doesn’t seem to see Emily as an impossible riddle, as most biographers have. Did Emily get bitten by a rabid dog and rush into the kitchen, seize an iron from the fire and cauterise the wound herself? Yes, but in doing so she was following the medical advice of the day. Did she cultivate “inwardness”? Yes, but there are no posthumous armchair diagnoses here, more an understanding that a writer managing a busy house might want to get good at preserving her own imaginative space. Did Emily get into some kind of romantic trouble with a working-class man (or woman) at 16? Possibly – but her fine writing about love across class divides could also have been inspired by her parents’ marriage. Did she have an affair with another female teacher in her job at Law Hill school? Maybe, but Lutz is more interested in the idea that Emily might have learned from Anne Lister, the real-life Gentleman Jack who lived nearby, to develop “androgyny and boldness”. I only found it a slight shame that Lutz included the story of Emily beating up her dog Keeper, which I suspect was invented by Charlotte’s first biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell.

Lutz has previously written about Victorian mourning ritual, and she is excellent on the intimacy of Emily’s writing about grief. She wonders if watching her mother spend seven months “in a liminal state – almost dead but still with the living” is why Emily’s work teemed with graves, and with “the terrible passion of the gloomy aggrieved still above earth”. She calls Wuthering Heights “one of the greatest haunted-house stories ever written”. She feelingly describes how a vault was built to bury Emily’s mother inside the church, and how Emily saw it reopened for one sister, then another, and then her brother – which makes Heathcliff’s obsessive desire to dig up Catherine’s grave and, later, to merge with her under the earth, seem less bizarre.

By locating Emily firmly in what she calls the texture of her everyday, Lutz reads Wuthering Heights not as (per the film) a crazed bodice-ripper, drunk on its own style, but a virtuoso debut novel from an author who had honed her craft since childhood and developed her own idiosyncratic creative process. This biography is, also, a wonderful book for writers on how to write the stories only you can, in snatched pockets of time if you have to, and against impossible odds. Lutz uses Charlotte’s correspondence with potential publishers to try to trace the way Emily wrote and rewrote her novel, speculating that she began with an “inner core of drama” after which “a backstory [was] built out” and then finally a frame was added, “ensnaring the narrative”. This attention to process is a refreshing change from the idea that she simply blurted it on to the page and had no idea what she had done.

On the billion dollar question of whether there is a lost second novel, Lutz seems pretty certain Emily was writing one, perhaps inspired by political upheaval in Europe. She even lets us dream that Emily might have stashed it in a wall at her house (as Lister did with her scandalous diary) or buried it on the moors from where – perhaps – it might one day be disinterred.

Paired reading draws on the central role that making connections takes in CPM. By reading two books at once throuugh the lens that they are related to each other, a reader draws connections to the real-word influences on the plot. An example of a book pairing is reading Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” alongside Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s “The Madwoman in the Attic.” While the connection between this pairing is rather direct — as Gilbert and Gubar’s book discusses the feminist implications of the character Bertha in “Jane Eyre” — the two books don’t have to be explicitly related. The goal is to critically engage with a piece of fiction by supplementing it with theoretical learning. (Cadence Merker)

Not An Angel, Just A Woman

Domestic Abuse and The Significance of Space in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Netflix's Maid

by Alyson Baugh

Digital Literature Review, 13(1), 130–140 (2026)

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Brontë, was published in the Victorian period, and Netflix’s TV series Maid was released in 2021. Despite being from different time periods, both stories explore domestic abuse, particularly through the significance of space and environment. Both texts use their individual stories to explore the double meaning of space and the reclamation of domestic spaces, and to redefine what makes a home a home.

And though the response to Emerald Fennell’s 2026 film version of Wuthering Heights has been pretty mixed, there’s no denying it’s brought about a bit of a Brontë boom; sales of the book have skyrocketed.

(If you ask us, that’s a good reason to adapt the two Brontë novels that have never had a TV or movie version made).

To me, that also means we’re long overdue for an Elizabeth Gaskell revival. After all, the author is said to have been influenced by Austen’s Pride & Prejudice when writing North & South (to great success, IMO).

She also wrote the world’s first controversial Brontë biography, The Life of Charlotte Brontë; she had been friends with the subject. (Amy Glover)

Oprah Daily shares its 'O list: Mother’s Day edition' which includes literary napkins.

Honor the heroine in your life with napkins that celebrate four female-centric literary classics: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Anne of Green Gables, and Little Women. Handmade and full of character, they’re sure to be the life of any party, whether a book club gathering or happy hour at home. (Holly Carter and Rae Ann Herman)

Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell: A Friendship

by Libby Tempest, Vice-Chair of the Gaskell Society

Wed 29 Apr, 7:00pm

Online via Zoom

This introductory talk explores the relationship between two giants of nineteenth century literature. Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell were opposites in many ways. Yet they were profoundly interested in each other’s work and lives. Their first meeting in the Lake District in 1850 led to a real friendship. Charlotte had written the instant classic Jane Eyre and then Shirley, while Elizabeth’s astounding debut novel, Mary Barton had been well-received.

This talk uses letters, writing and contemporary accounts to try and discover what held the friendship between these two extraordinary women together. With speaker Libby Tempest, Vice-Chair of the Gaskell Society. 

The second in the Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell mini-season, in partnership with Elizabeth Gaskell’s House.

Adriana Trigiani recommends

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

“Every summer, I reread Jane Eyre. I love that story. Because it's about a poor girl who's shunned by her family, thrown out, has no reason ever, at any point in her life, to do the right thing. But she's got a moral code. And she cannot be deterred from her path of being a decent human being. So that's the kind of historical fiction I like.” —Adriana Trigiani (Sarah Vincent)