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 ... In This Dark Night, Ms. Lutz, a professor literature at Pennsylvania State University, deploys flash and elegance when tracing the wellsprings of her subject’s genius to their sources.
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 ... Lutz unspools this short, seemingly uneventful life with sympathy, lyricism and economy — as well as humor ... 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.'
Fleshes out the author’s life through manuscripts, marginalia, drawings, and diaries ... Lutz’s is a tactile approach ... The biography, inevitably, is a family portrait. There is a tendency in popular accounts of Emily and Charlotte to cast the sisters as opposites ... Lutz occasionally invokes this contrast but for the most part offers a useful corrective ... Biography usually promises to demystify its subjects, but Lutz shows how contexts can accumulate around a mysterious figure without quite explaining her subject away.
Tactile details and a no-nonsense approach make this biography a refreshing change from more lurid fare ... Lutz has previously written about Victorian mourning ritual, and she is excellent on the intimacy of Emily’s writing about grief ... 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.
Deborah Lutz doesn’t commit the prime biographical sin of trying to make Brontë too easy to understand or relate to. Instead, she asks more questions than she answers ... Some readers may be frustrated by the paucity of new facts or explanations for why Emily was the way she was, for others (including this reader) this vagueness is the very reason for the book’s success ... After reading This Dark Night, I don’t feel like I really know Emily Brontë any better, but I do think I understand her world a bit better ... Those readers for whom the mystery is the point will certainly be pleased.
Gorgeously atmospheric and freshly illuminating ... Lutz traces every turn in Emily’s arduous life, paying particular attention to how she was never without pencil and paper, her laboriously crafted micro manuscripts, and, most remarkably, how committed she was to writing and performing stories set in the siblings’ fantasyland, Gondal ... A uniquely enlightening portrait of an endlessly fascinating writer.
Brontë emerges from Lutz’s splendid biography as a 'consummate artist who developed her genius quickly and with great confidence' ... Lutz’s exhilarating prose animates This Dark Night, lending fresh insights into the life and writing of one of literature’s most enduring authors.
A dazzling, rigorously researched biography of Emily Brontë ... Frustratingly little remains of those thousands of pages (it’s not known what happened to them), but Lutz paints a vivid portrait of a singular, peculiar writer. Readers will be rapt.
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.
