This is the Mask: A Book Blog

Thank you NetGalley and W. W. Norton & Company for the ARC of Deborah Lutz’s “This Dark Night.”

There have been many biographies of the Brontes and studies written about their books. Because of this, it’s very easy for a new book to come across as unoriginal. This is not the case with Deborah Lutz’s brilliant study of Emily Bronte in “This Dark Night.” Lutz explores the childhoods of all of the Bronte children (six, all told). She highlights the profound influence their mother Maria had on all of the children despite her early death: her love of literature and art, and her political and charitable views. She considers the effect the deaths of the two oldest sisters may have had on the surviving children, and how much the wild Yorkshire landscape influenced the sisters’ writing, Emily especially.

Deborah Lutz examines the development of Emily Bronte’s writing, from her first childhood stories written in the fictional world of Gondal, to her mature poetry and the creation of her one novel “Wuthering Heights.” Interspersed with treks across the moors and writing were the m minute details of Emily’s home life. She is the daughter that longed for home the most while she was away at school, and once she returned, she never left, apart from brief trips. Her death at the age of thirty, soon after her brother Branwell’s death, and followed swiftly by her sister Anne’s (her closest sibling), left a void in the Bronte household, as though the very soul of the house had departed, and with it the probability of other literary gems that Emily’s pen might have written.