Deborah Lutz presents This Dark Night, with Heather Clark

Please note that an RSVP does not guarantee you a seat. We can accommodate approximately 50 seated and 80 standing. If you require a seat, please plan to arrive early.

About the book:

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 twenty years, renowned scholar Deborah Lutz sketches the days of a woman crafting otherworldly fiction while running her father’s parsonage: writing interweaving with household work, daydreaming, and exploring the rough-hewn outdoors.

As she traces the influence of Brontë’s life and work, Lutz follows how Brontë’s fantastical early poems of the night sky, women rulers, and outsiders and rebels grew into the stormy, transcendent Wuthering Heights. Lutz also illuminates the overlooked ways that the legendary writer addressed debates of her time that still resonate today, including questions of gender and sexuality, race and class, and rapid industrialization set against the natural world.

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. Uniting the domestic and the cosmic, This Dark Night plumbs the life and writing of this idiosyncratic woman, dark soul, and monumental genius.

Deborah Lutz is the Kelly Professor in Nineteenth-Century English and American Literature at Pennsylvania State University. A Guggenheim, Cullman, and NEH Fellow, she is the author of The Brontë Cabinet, Pleasure Bound, and other works. Her writing has appeared in numerous journals, including the New York Times. She lives in Pennsylvania and New York City.

Heather Clark is the author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, one of the New York Times’s Ten Best Books of 2021, as well as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and a “Book of the Year” in The Guardian, The Times, The Boston Globe, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. Her recent awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NYPL Cullman Center Fellowship, the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize, an NEH Public Scholars Fellowship, and a Leon Levy Biography Fellowship. Clark’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Harvard Review, Poetry, Time, Air Mail, Literary Hub, PN Review, Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. She holds a doctorate in English literature from Oxford University and lives outside New York City.

Deborah Lutz photo credit: Kris Badertscher

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Community Bookstore