Book Review: ‘This Dark Night: Emily Brontë, a Life,’ by Deborah Lutz

THIS DARK NIGHT: Emily Brontë, a Life, by Deborah Lutz

Emily Brontë did not care about being likable.

She was described as introverted, odd, guarded to the point of taciturnity, and her “extreme reserve seemed impenetrable,” said her friend Ellen Nussey. “Except to go to church or take a walk on the hills,” wrote her sister Charlotte, “she rarely crossed the threshold of home.”

Her one published novel, the darkly Gothic “Wuthering Heights,” was met with bafflement, but has come to be regarded as a work of genius, and Brontë is also today considered a poet of unusual power. This, combined with her early death and sparsely documented life, has led to a public image as a farouche outsider artist leaping around the Yorkshire moors like a Victorian Kate Bush.

As the scholar Deborah Lutz writes in her engaging new biography, “This Dark Night,” it’s not quite that simple. Emily was indeed a knotty character of “devilish ferocity,” but she was also informed, engaged, even cosmopolitan in her reading and outlook.

Emily left behind tantalizingly little ephemera. Much of this biography ends up being speculative. But by drawing on a wide range of contemporary sources, the author is able to evoke the comets and heat waves her subject would surely have experienced; the local suicides she would doubtless have read about; the inn where she conceivably might have stayed. No detail goes unaccounted for, from (probable) feminine hygiene practices to (likely) interaction with a mesmerist.

Lutz pulls off this sometimes tricky approach with élan, partly because she isn’t wedded to one thesis: Emily may well have clashed with Charlotte; she could have had an abortive romance with someone unsuitable; she might have experienced same-sex attraction — but Lutz is careful to remind us that we can’t ever really know.

Born in 1818, Emily was the fifth of six children. Her mother died when Emily was 3, followed four years later by Emily’s two eldest sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, ages 11 and 10. Charlotte, Emily, Anne and their brother, Branwell, would live in the Haworth parsonage, along with their father, an aunt and a domestic servant, for the rest of their lives.

One can’t write about one Brontë sister without discussing all three. They worked together and slept together. Their juvenilia, which ranged from fantastical world-building to proto-modernist accounts of domestic details to poetry, is the stuff of legend, much of it written in miniature books and magazines that required a magnifying glass to read.

Although the children did not receive much formal schooling, their father encouraged them to learn everything, in keeping with the progressive Christianity he preached. Emily studied Latin and geometry and kept abreast of the era’s scientific discoveries.

She reveled in nature — her excellent surviving sketches, as well as her poetry, show how attuned she was to the night sky, the changing wind, bird life. The area was steeped in lore and mythology and places with names like Scar Hill and Deep Arse Delf. Dramatic weather clearly informed her sensibility; there were floods that washed away animals, howling winds that destroyed property, blizzards that kept residents “weather-fast” for weeks at a time.

Yet Emily was not provincial. The family followed world events closely and considered themselves “furious politicians.” They read the Romantic poets — especially Byron — and Gothic fiction, but also scandalous French novels, Dickens, feminist writing and, later, Ruskin and Emerson. As progressives in a part of the country filled with mills and factories, the Brontës would also have been alive to the ravages of industrialization.

Nor were they confined to Haworth. Emily, with Charlotte, spent almost a year at a school in Brussels where they (probably) experienced music, art and culture and (definitely) became proficient in French.

After unhappy stints as governesses, Charlotte and Anne returned home and all three started writing in earnest, critiquing and annotating one another’s work. In 1848, a volume of their collected verse, which the sisters paid to have published, appeared under the deliberately androgynous pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. It garnered some positive reviews but sold only two copies.

After Charlotte published “Jane Eyre” and it became a sensation, the way was paved for Emily and Anne to publish novels of their own: “Wuthering Heights” and “Agnes Grey.” (Lutz has fun suggesting Emily’s possible inspirations, like the ancient house in the area said to be haunted by a headless ghost, the traveling glee singer called Earnshaw, and the legend of one Heathcliff-like Jack Sharp, a revenge-minded nogoodnik.)

Critics mainly found “Wuthering Heights” “coarse, strange, disagreeable” — although one praised its “savage grandeur.” Undeterred, Emily started on a second novel.

But in October 1848, Branwell died suddenly. Emily developed a bad cough; she died in December. Anne died, also from consumption, five months later.

The enormity of this loss may help explain Charlotte’s devotion to rehabilitating her sisters’ images; she revealed their real first names and set about revising “Wuthering Heights.” Although she had described Emily’s poetry as “condensed and terse, vigorous and genuine,” she edited that, too.

After her death, Emily’s literary star began to rise. Emily Dickinson asked that “Ellis Bell’s” poem “No Coward Soul Is Mine” be read at her funeral; George Eliot loved “Remembrance.”

Lutz unspools this short, seemingly uneventful life with sympathy, lyricism and economy — as well as humor. (“In the middle of the page of Horace translations, Emily sketched sadomasochistic and murderous scenarios, not pertinent to the text,” she notes with droll understatement.) And her particular interest in Emily’s few surviving artifacts — her childhood sewing samplers, her rosewood travel desk — feels apt. (Lutz also wrote “The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects.”)

Emily Brontë is a subject much of whose art lay in extrapolation — gathering experience and knowledge, magpie-like, wherever she could, to weave into her own. Ultimately, the reader is persuaded of Ellen Nussey’s words: “She was in the strictest sense a law unto herself, and a heroine in keeping to her law.”

THIS DARK NIGHT: Emily Brontë, a Life | By Deborah Lutz | Norton | 325 pp. | $33.99