This Dark Night: The Life of Emily Brontë
Deborah Lutz
May 2026 · Bloomsbury GB Audio · Narrated by Christine Rendel
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11 hr 56 min
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About this audiobook
Bloomsbury presents This Dark Night: The Life of Emily Brontë by Deborah Lutz, read by Christine Rendel
'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.
'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.
Bloomsbury presents This Dark Night: The Life of Emily Brontë by Deborah Lutz, read by Christine Rendel
'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 ...
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About the author
Deborah Lutz is a Victorian literature scholar who has been teaching and writing about the Brontës for decades. She was the editor of a Norton Critical Edition of Jane Eyre and a Norton Library edition of Wuthering Heights, and her book The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects, was shortlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography.
Deborah Lutz is a Victorian literature scholar who has been teaching and writing about the Brontës for decades. She was the editor of a Norton Critical Edition of Jane Eyre and a Norton Library edition of Wuthering Heights, and her book The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects, was shortli...
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