Emily Brontë was only 27-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 Brontë’s masterpiece and it has taken even longer to know Brontë. Drawing on formerly inaccessible notebooks and manuscripts, THIS DARK NIGHT constructs a portrait of Brontë, her famous writing sisters Charlotte and Anne and the effect of their sisters’ and mother’s tragic deaths. In the first full-length biography in over 20 years, renowned scholar Deborah Lutz sketches the days of a woman crafting otherworldly fiction while running her father’s parsonage. From her menagerie of dogs and birds to the beloved moors that Brontë wandered and later emblazoned in her novel, Lutz depicts the passions of an author at odds with convention.