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This Dark Night
- Author
- Deborah Lutz
- Narrator
- Christine Rendel
- Publisher
- Bloomsbury Publishing
- Publish Date
- 28 May 2026
- Run Time
- 11 hours 56 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
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What to expect
'Compelling' -- Spectator
A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS PICK
'A wonderful book' -- Guardian
The first comprehensive biography of Emily Brontë in over two decades.
Emily Jane Brontë was just 27 when she started writing the wayward and electric novel Wuthering Heights. Three years later, she was dead. Out of step with her own time and remembered as the strangest of the Brontë sisters, there's much that we don't know about her — most of her papers were destroyed after her death. But as Deborah Lutz explores in this, one of the first biographies of Emily in 20 years, the writing that has survived seethes with storm and strife and with the beautifully desolate landscape of Yorkshire.
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.
Critics Review
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Lutz’s recreation of Emily’s environment has solidity and dimension, and the sense of being transported to Haworth Parsonage is powerful.
Times Literary Supplement
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Emerald Fennell ’s hallucinatory adaptation of Wuthering Heights invited us to consider Emily Brontë in one light; Lutz’s painstaking account shows her in quite another. Far from the eccentric, isolated genius , Lutz’s Brontë is grounded in her material reality, from everyday household tasks to illness and grief.
Guardian - Best Books to Dip into This Summer
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It says much for Lutz’s skills as a writer that she succeeds in creating such a seamless and compelling narrative out of her materials. Her insight and sensitivity as a critic, as well her deep knowledge of the sources, allow her to open up the inner life of her famously reclusive subject. The result is a convincing portrait and an impressive achievement.
The Spectator
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Refreshing… [Lutz] is excellent on the intimacy of Emily’s writing about grief… this biography is a wonderful book.
Guardian
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Discerning
Independent (in their May 2026 ‘Books of the Month’ list)
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Engaging new biography…Lutz unspools this short, seemingly uneventful life with sympathy, lyricism and economy — as well as humor.
New York Times
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A new, quietly punchy biography
i newspaper
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A dazzling, rigorously researched biography of Emily Brontë. Lutz paints a vivid portrait of a singular, peculiar writer. Readers will be rapt.
Publishers Weekly
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Deborah Lutz reveals Emily Brontë to us anew in this fresh, compelling, and perfectly paced jewel of a biography. Lutz dispenses with the Brontë myth and gives us a far more moving and accurate portrait of a bold, innovative, emotionally attuned writer deeply rooted in her imagination, family, landscape, and community. This Dark Night is a triumph.
Heather Clark, Pulitzer Prize-finalist author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
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A lively, comprehensive, and thoroughly researched biography… Lutz paints a vivid portrait of the surroundings, people and politics… This Dark Night, underpinned by wide-ranging sources and expert analysis, is a discerning insight into the woman behind a tale which has captivated generations.
The Press Association
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Lutz has a nice turn of phrase…and is particularly good on weather, landscape and conjuring up sensory experiences.
The Times
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In This Dark Night, Lutz paints Emily Bronte's life with exquisite detail. The completeness of this biography means we are given as much a picture of the material lives of Emily as we are her intellectual life, so one can feel it all: her chilblains, her handwriting cramped onto folded manuscripts, her dog, her sisters and her beloved moors. Everything comes alive just as it might in a Brontë novel. I find myself returning to the world of the Parsonage, to Emily's Gothic playground, again and again through this book.
Sarvat Hasin, author of Strange Girls
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[Lutz] gives us lavish servings of literary aesthetics. By the end, the reader understands much of what went into Brontë’s making, and leaves feeling grateful, buffeted and a little awestruck by the intense, self-contained, short-lived author of one of the world’s most esteemed novels.
Wall Street Journal
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A vivid biography...
History Today
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Absorbing…[Lutz] is terrific on the details of Emily’s life.
Literary Review
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[Lutz] is good at minutiae and knows much about 19th-century arts and crafts and writing materials. Lutz, as biographer, has drawn close to her subject and watched over her and with her, through words and artefacts, and it is always interesting to read about this enigmatic and evasive figure.
The New Statesman
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Atmospheric and empathetic… A thoughtful, imaginative portrait that brings fresh interpretation to familiar ground.
Kirkus Reviews
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Given that only three letters written by Emily survive, Professor Lutz’s reconstruction is remarkable indeed. The author wears her scholarship lightly, investing her account with authority. The book succeeds in its intentions and will surely return its readers to the work of all three members of this remarkable sorority that it celebrates with insight and a wealth of illuminating detail.
Country Life
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Emily Bronte's complex inner life comes more sharply into focus.
Church Times
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A captivating, feeling account of the most enigmatic of the Brontë family.
The Herald (Scotland)
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Splendid…Lutz’s exhilarating prose animates This Dark Night, lending fresh insights into the life and writing of one of literature’s most enduring authors.
BookPage
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I loved this illuminating, comprehensive biography.
The Bookseller
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Deborah Lutz’s extraordinary This Dark Night gives us a wilder and more wonder-filled Emily Brontë than any previous account of the famed sisterhood. Lutz knows her subject the way Brontë knew the Yorkshire moors, and her biography ‘blazes forth,’ as an early reviewer wrote of Wuthering Heights, with a rare brilliance derived from passionate and abiding engagement.
Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life
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Deborah Lutz reimagines what literary biography can do, interlacing details of life and text with a luminous prose that achieves a kind of resurrection. Haunting and gorgeous, like a windy moonlit moor.
Natalie Dykstra, author of Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner
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This Dark Night is an extraordinary act of biographical reanimation — not only of the strange, enigmatic Emily Brontë, who has never been more vividly rendered, but also of Brontë’s physical world, the smells and textures and sounds of her beloved West Yorkshire moors. This gorgeous book hums with vitality.
Lance Richardson, author of True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen
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Deborah Lutz uniquely captured the essence of Emily. An especially endearing and often poignant element of This Dark Night is the generous amount of correspondence that Lutz includes between Emily and her sisters, friends and relatives, which not only serves to highlight the intimacy of their connections, but also brings the larger 19th-century world into their quite isolated rural environment.
Book Reporter
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In This Dark Night, Lutz’s deep knowledge of Emily Brontë transcends biography and – appropriate for her subject, who wrote one of the most famous ghost stories in Western literature – approaches a haunting… This Dark Night gives readers a great deal of fresh information about Emily Brontë… I learned more about Emily Brontë and her famous siblings from reading This Dark Night than I knew before.
The Rumpus
User Reviews
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Details
- Author
- Deborah Lutz
- Narrator
- Christine Rendel
- Duration
- 11 hours 56 minutes
- Release Date
- 28 May 2026
- ISBN
- 9781399417051
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Bloomsbury Publishing
- Genre
- Biography: writers, Literature: history and criticism, European history
Synopsis
Bloomsbury presents This Dark Night: The Life of Emily Brontë by Deborah Lutz, read by Christine Rendel'Compelling' -- SpectatorA NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS PICK'A wonderful book' -- GuardianThe first comprehensive biography of Emily Brontë in over two decades.Emily Jane Brontë was just 27 when she started writing the wayward and electric novel Wuthering Heights. Three years later, she was dead. Out of step with her own time and remembered as the strangest of the Brontë sisters, there's much that we don't know about her — most of her papers were destroyed after her death. But as Deborah Lutz explores in this, one of the first biographies of Emily in 20 years, the writing that has survived seethes with storm and strife and with the beautifully desolate landscape of Yorkshire.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.
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