This Dark Night: Emily Bronte, a Life
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.'
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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.
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