Deborah Lutz’s new biography of Emily Brontë — the first such work in over two decades — offers a considerably more nuanced portrait of this individual woman and idiosyncratic writer. Bronte is in good hands: Lutz, an English professor at Penn State University, excelled with her innovative 2015 book, The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects. Now, with This Dark Night: Emily Brontë, A Life, Lutz has sharpened her gaze and drawn on previously unavailable manuscripts and notebooks to produce what is arguably the most comprehensive study to date of the enigmatic author of Wuthering Heights. [...]

Some of Lutz’s standout chapters are on Wuthering Heights. [...]

This Dark Night will appeal to all sorts, from the Brontë lay reader to the Brontë aficionado. It should be required reading for those who cast doubt on Brontë’s genius after having only experienced (or endured) Emerald Fennell’s recent overwrought and underwhelming film adaptation of Wuthering Heights, a textbook example of style over substance. Along with her analysis of Bronté’s “weird, witchy” masterpiece, Lutz provides insight into her mesmerizing poetry. At regular junctures, she reveals how Brontë’s life informed her art. The loss of her mother at a young age engendered a question that Brontë would grapple with throughout her career: “Where did life end and death begin?” 

Lutz makes clear at the outset that certain chapters of Brontë’s story remain a mystery. At the age of 16, she got into trouble. About this incident, Lutz speculates that she may have become romantically entangled with a young man, “or a young woman.” Most of Brontë’s papers were lost, possibly destroyed, after her death, which prompts Lutz to wonder if she had started a second novel and stashed this unfinished work behind a wall panel in the parsonage or even secreted it out on the moors.  

Despite the gaps, Lutz utilizes a range of sources to convincingly flesh her subject out. We come away from this riveting biography with the awareness that a prodigious talent was snuffed out prematurely. We might wince as certain traits and themes are described as “Emilian,” but otherwise it is hard not to be captivated by the Brontë that emerges. She may have been that “untameable spirit”: We see instances where she doesn’t suffer fools — or, in one jaw-dropping case, disobedient animals. But she was also fiercely intelligent, independent, principled, and driven. Martha, the Brontës’ servant, conceded she was “self-willed … but devoted and kind.” As a woman, she was out of step with her own time, but as a novelist, she was way ahead of it. (Malcolm Forbes)

   

A recent scholarly book with Brontë-related content:

The Rise of Celebrity Authorship

Nineteenth-Century Print Culture and Antislavery

by Sarah Danielle Allison

Columbia University Press

ISBN: 9780231209717 (Paperback)

ISBN: 9780231209700 (Hardcover)

ISBN: 9780231558075 (E-book)

August 2025

Literary celebrity in the nineteenth century emerged from a miscellaneous array of trending print forms, including antislavery writing, which was a popular, consumable form of literature in the period. Antislavery print culture could function as a pop culture, leveraging cultural myths about gender and authorship through print forms that connected readers with writers: printed collections of author signatures, descriptions of writers’ homes, autobiography, biography, and travel writing. The Rise of Celebrity Authorship traces surprising relations among figures and across shared forms in the period: What do antislavery forms and figures tell us about literary celebrity and the networks of transatlantic print culture?

Sarah Danielle Allison illuminates the collective creation of celebrity by tracing unexpected connections within this anarchic nineteenth-century literary marketplace. Bringing together book history with more recent computational approaches, The Rise of Celebrity Authorship shifts focus from the conventional literary work of major writers to the breadth of print forms circulating around them. Allison considers a variety of texts adjacent to the novel, including Edgar Allan Poe’s satire of autograph collecting, antislavery gift books, and a Southern travelogue by the Swedish writer Frederika Bremer. She draws striking parallels between two starkly different 1858 texts: Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë, which sought to unearth the reality behind Jane Eyre, and Josiah Henson’s autobiography, which circulated as the life of the “original Uncle Tom.” A rich account of the competing and complementary forces that shape images of authors, this book reveals the collaborative work of literary production and celebrity.

   

After Wuthering Heights became one of the biggest 2026 movie releases and available to watch on streaming, it’s interesting to know more about the behind-the-scenes of it all. In an interview with Refinery29, Robbie said there was one scene when she and Elordi knew they “got it” as an on-screen couple:

There were a couple of moments. Even on day one. [We shot] the first scene in the movie where Cathy flings open the bed hangings, and [Heathcliff is] lying in bed. And then we ended up cutting this bit but I walked up over him, and then crouch down and got like this close to his face and told him to, ‘get up, we've got neighbors,’ or whatever it was.

What a wild, fun fact! I would think they’d want the moment the Wuthering Heights co-stars really clicked on set to be kept in the movie, but then again, part of what makes this film good is all the yearning. As Robbie explained:

And we cut that bit because the proximity is something we wanted to save. But, I mean, that was day one, and even then, everyone was kind of like, ‘Whoa.’ And we were like, ‘Okay, I think this movie's gonna work.’ Also just because she's throwing something at him, and he's throwing it back, and he's like, ‘What?’ There was already an intensity between them that I think we could build on from that point.

Oh, but now I want to see this scene! I could totally see these two characters getting too close for comfort while in their shared home without even realizing it, since they grew up together, and then kind of pulling back in more public-facing moments. That being said, I totally trust that if that wasn’t the right move for those characters, it wasn’t right for the movie either. What a good feeling that must have been, though.

When CinemaBlend had the chance to speak to writer/director Fennell, we asked her why it takes so long for the pair to kiss, and she said it was important that she make it “frustrating” for the audience to see these two share scenes but not get intimate yet because “the wait is the fun.” And during our chat with Robbie and Elordi, they told us they think Heathcliff and Cathy fell in love in their very first scene together when they were kids

While it’s easy as an audience member to yell at the TV screen, “just kiss!” in the context of the story – which isn’t really supposed to be an epic romance – they are from two different class systems, and it was considered wrong for them to decide to be a couple or fraternize before marriage. Ultimately, while we yearn for these two, they have an incredibly tragic story. But it’s entertaining nonetheless! (Sarah El-Mahmoud)

   

‘Between her and the world’: Legacies, Interpretations, Adaptations
pp 97-99  Author: O'Callaghan, Dr. Claire

Research Articles

No Atom Rendered Void: The Aerial and Alchemical Enchantment of Wuthering Heights
pp. 100-117 Author: Duell, Meg
Abstract: 
This article maps how elemental and meteorological metaphysics function in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), arguing that the novel’s complex recursive structure is facilitated through an alchemical process by which the collision of air and materiality—the transcendent elements embodied by Catherine and Heathcliff—activates psychic, spatial, mortal and temporal ‘wandering’. These points of elemental friction, defined here as ‘portals of enchantment’, connect their subjects with past and future iterations of themselves and others. Additionally, it explores how the novel’s elemental ‘portals’ extend beyond spatial thresholds into aerial and avian touchstones, allowing Brontë to infuse the novel with folkloric subtext..

This Rustic Muse: Developing a Political Voice in the Poetry of Patrick Brontë
pp. 118-134  Author: Avery, Simon
Abstract:
This article examines a range of the Reverend Patrick Brontë’s poetry—a much neglected body of work in Brontë criticism—and argues that it was here that Brontë was able to develop a political voice and a sense of literature as a vehicle for political exploration and debate. In considering Brontë’s two collections, Cottage Poems (1811) and The Rural Minstrel (1813), in the contexts of war abroad and industrial, economic and social unrest at home, this article explores what the poetry tells us about Brontë’s political thinking, his relationship with political structures and hierarchies, and his anxieties about political cohesion and security. What emerges is a poet whose work, written under the guise of his ‘rustic muse’, offers fascinating interventions into contemporaneous political debates regarding poverty, industrialisation, the city, community, the place of religion in society, nation-state formation and the nature of liberty and equality more generally.

Reading Jane Eyre as a Hagiographic Romance
pp.  28-43 Author: Schiavone, Matteo
Abstract:
This article uses queer medievalism as a critical method to interpret Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), reading it as a hagiographic romance, a hybrid text that blurs clear-cut generic boundaries. As the fictionalised autobiography of a character who finds the strength of self-belief through mystical experiences and the Christian doctrine of endurance, the narrative is akin to medieval hagiographic and visionary literature, which the comparison with The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1430s) demonstrates. At the same time, however, similar to Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval, it follows the pattern of a chivalric quest romance, as Jane physically moves outwards and goes through several stages of development before being ready to marry Mr Rochester. Ultimately, queered genres create a space where Jane can develop a queer gender identity beyond stifling societal expectations.

‘To give the passage quite a contrary turn’: Female Religious Authority and Subversive Hermeneutics in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley
pp. 132-152 Author: Wiegand, Holly
Abstract:
This article argues for a reading of Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849) as a historiography of women’s challenges to androcentric Anglican structures of authority and measures of biblical interpretation. Shirley stages the possibility and precarity of women’s public religious authority amid socio-religious discourses, underscoring the relationship between Shirley and Caroline as a space for proto-feminist theological and interpretive revisions. Attending to Brontë’s heroine’s push against religious exclusivism foregrounds Caroline’s often-overlooked hermeneutic turns in her dispute with mill overseer Joe Scott, Brontë’s mouthpiece for inherited anti-woman Anglican interpretations. This article contends that class and gender inflect the act and reception of biblical interpretation for Brontë, playing out historical debates about women’s preaching and discussions about working-class Dissenting groups that supported women’s ministries, such as Methodism. It nuances Brontë’s views on the role of women in religion as she too is pulled between traditional dogma and radical woman-centred hermeneutics along class lines.

‘Are you not a little severe?’: Lucy’s Wit in Her Narrative Voice in Villette
pp. 153-166 Author: Zhang, Zhiying
Abstract:
This article provides a new perspective on Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), analysing the function of wit through the lens of psychoanalytic and comic theories. Primarily based on Freud’s theory of wit, the analysis examines various wit-making techniques, exploring how Lucy employs these methods as a means of self-expression and critique. The use of wit breaks the serious narrative tone, creating a comic effect that allows readers to enjoy the story and empathise with Lucy’s painful experiences. It also allows Lucy to release her suppressed emotional pain and struggles within her narrative. By demonstrating how wit is integral to Lucy’s journey of self-discovery and self-expression, this article contributes to the ongoing scholarly conversation about comic elements in Brontë’s writing.

Heathcliff, Harry and Hardin: After as a New Layer to Wuthering Heights
pp. 167-183 Author: de Beus, Emma
Abstract:
This article considers Anna Todd’s After series (2013–2015) as a new adaptive layer to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). It explores the relationship between the two works by considering the adaptive history and context of Wuthering Heights before moving onto an analysis of After, examining its multiple points of origin. The analysis includes fanfiction, the boy band One Direction and other influences on After, both classical and contemporary. The article then undertakes close readings of Wuthering Heights and After to establish clear points of connection and overarching parallels, arguing that a reading of After exposes it as a hitherto unrecognised adaptation of Wuthering Heights. By shedding light on this relationship, it is possible to better understand how Emily Brontë’s novel has found an increasingly varied afterlife in the twenty-first century—one that both speaks to the contemporary climate and reflects new understandings of the novel itself.

Book Reviews

A Brontë Reading List: 2023
pp. 184-195 Reviewed by Pearson, Sara L. & Cook, Peter
Abstract:
This reading list is an annotated bibliography of scholarly and critical work on the Brontës published in 2023. We have attempted to compile a comprehensive list of resources by consulting the MLA International Bibliography, Academic Search Complete, and the Brontë Blog (http://bronteblog.blogspot.com). Book chapters and scholarly articles on the Brontës are included except those articles published in Brontë Studies. Entire books on the Brontës are in the reviews section of this journal. The author’s initials in brackets are provided after each annotation.

The Rise of Celebrity Authorship: Nineteenth-Century Print Culture and Antislavery
pp. 195-198 Reviewed by Ayrton, Tricia

Brontë Women’s Writing Festival, 26–28 September 2025
pp. 198-200 Reviewed by Dawn Gant, Rose

A Vain Talent? The Question of Female Artistry in the Life and Work of Anne Brontë
pp. 200-202 Reviewed by Sanders, Valerie

Women and Madness in the Early Romantic Novel. Injured Minds, Ruined Lives
pp. 202-204 Reviewed by Seijo-Richart, María

The Banagher Brontë Group Festival, Ireland, 15–18 August 2025
pp. 205-207 Reviewed by Wilcock, Joanne

Announcement

Brontë Studies Early Career Research Essay Prize 2026
pp. 208-209 by O'Callagahn, Claire