This Dark Night

<p>Emily Bronte (1818-48) was only twenty-seven years old when she began work on one of the most important novels in the English language. It took the world almost a century to catch up to <em>Wuthering Heights</em>, and it has taken even longer to know Bronte-an elusive figure, with a ghostly legacy marred by the loss (and likely destruction) of almost all her personal papers. Drawing on formerly inaccessible notebooks and manuscripts, Deborah Lutz constructs a portrait of Bronte, her famous writing sisters Charlotte and Anne, and the family's tragic deaths against the texture of Bronte's days as a woman both tending a Victorian household and crafting otherworldly fiction. Lutz traces Bronte's passions from her animal menagerie to her beloved moors as she honed her fantastical poems and transcendent novel. <em>This Dark Night</em> plumbs the life and writing of this idiosyncratic woman, dark soul, and monumental genius.</p>