This Dark Night by Deborah Lutz review – Emily Brontë’s world

Tactile details and a no-nonsense approach make this biography a refreshing change from more lurid fareBoth Emily Brontë and her only novel Wuthering Heights have been called “deranged”, “crazed” or (especially online, in the wake of the recent film) “unhinged”. So it’s a relief to read a biography where she comes across, instead, as more grounded, steady, sane. Deborah Lutz, whose 2015 book The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects made such an impression, anchors her narrative in solid things: the too-short bed Emily squeezed herself into; the pockets she stuffed with paper, pencils and moorland treasures; the laundry she looked after, including stockings with “AB5” sewn into them to indicate they were her sister Anne’s fifth pair. Lutz’s Emily is an eminently practical woman who wrote “while baking, in front of a peat fire perched on a little stool, or while walking” and who “used the tactile keeping of order as a prop and prom