There was no ‘I’ in Emily Brontë

This Dark Night: The Life of Emily Brontë, Deborah Lutz, Bloomsbury, £20

In penning his reminiscences of Tolstoy while the great man still drew breath, Maxim Gorky could work straight from life and avoid the dusty archive. But these circumstances are rare. Ordinarily, whatever scraps have been interred in the archival tomb are all the biographer has, and it is from such inert material that she must make a heart beat again, a soul flicker across the page. It is a hard job at the best of times, but nearly impossible when the subject does not want to be known; when the scant records reveal not someone who held court, whose table talk was scribbled down by fawning disciples, but a figure darting in and out of rooms. How is a biographer to capture a subject like this, one as inscrutable as a stone, as ethereal as the west wind? This is the dilemma facing anyone who undertakes to write the life of Emily Brontë.

The mounting number of biographies of Emily is a testament to her elusiveness. Like a moth, she has been caught, chloroformed and staked onto the page many times over, but always with a new label. First, she was a genius recluse, then a wild spirit, and more recently an agoraphobic anorexic. But as Emily herself put it, ‘Vain are the thousand creeds’, ‘worthless as withered weeds’: she is not a woman who stays pinned for long. It is refreshing, therefore, that in Deborah Lutz’s This Dark Night: The Life of Emily Brontë, she has dispensed with these deadening labels, with what she calls the ‘twentieth and twenty-first-century ideas and identities [that] don’t import easily into the past’. Instead, she sets out simply to render the ‘texture’ of Emily’s days, ‘to ponder what she wore, saw, heard, smelled, and felt along her skin’.

This tactile approach, a method Lutz developed in her earlier book, The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects, is employed to great effect. The Haworth Parsonage, with its graveside aspect, rears up darkly before our eyes, and the smell of its peat fires, of the various dogs and cats, of tallow candles and pungent bedpans wafts out from the page. With only four rooms, it was a crowded home for its many inhabitants, but when we learn that every member of the family aspired to be a writer, the space feels smaller still. What could be seen represented only a sliver of the bustling reality of this house, in which whole universes were dreamt up by children who found as much freedom in them as they did on the wild Yorkshire moors. Goethe wrote that ‘talents are best nurtured in solitude’, but it was among the chiming clocks and creaking floorboards of this cramped and dimly lit parsonage that three great writers were born.

Given that creativity in the Brontë family was always a collaborative affair, no biography of Emily could consider her in isolation from her sisters, Charlotte and Anne, or from her wayward brother, Branwell. Even the ghosts of her mother and her two older sisters, Elizabeth and Maria, were ever present – their successive burials in the family vault having had a profound effect on the minds of the surviving children. Emily was not, then, as Lutz explains, the isolated genius of the Brontë myth but connected, as though by a series of ‘underground rivers’, to a shared familial source. Lutz is particularly good at setting out the various components of this spring of intellectual and creative life: Blackwood’s Magazine with its dungeon tales, Irish folk stories, the well-stocked library at Ponden House with its pornographic volumes, copies of Byron, of de Sade, of Virgil, of Horace, books on geometry, and a well-thumbed History of British Birds representing only a fraction of their shared reading. Like Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen before them, George Eliot and, later, Virginia Woolf, the Brontë sisters had the run of their father’s library but with very little guidance. It was in this permissive atmosphere, and out of the tomes of a patriarchal culture, that they would make something entirely their own.

While Lutz is attentive to this shared life, she tries not to lose sight of Emily for too long. We glimpse her ‘peripatetic creativity’ in the image of her reading while kneading dough, or writing on palm-sized pieces of paper that could be secreted away in an apron; we get a sense of her fierce stoicism from the story of the dog bite wound that she seared with a red-hot iron; from the various descriptions of her animals – including her intimidating mastiff, Keeper, and her wild falcon, Nero – we see a woman who gloried ‘in the ferociousness of nature’; and in her stream-of-consciousness-like journals and academic essays we recognise the cast of that original mind that would go on to write poetry like ‘No Coward Soul Is Mine’, and create the dark, primordial world of Wuthering Heights.

But these are only glimpses, occasional flashes of illumination in a biography that otherwise contains a large amount of speculative padding. Few paragraphs go by that don’t pose unanswerable questions (‘Was Emily a whistler?’, ‘did she make herself sick, perhaps by not eating?’), and the phrase ‘she may have’ is used as reflexively as a full stop. Large swathes of conjecture about what Emily might have seen or done (often based on Charlotte’s experiences) serve as descriptive stepping stones when the facts are too thin on the ground. And a lengthy plot summary of Wuthering Heights reads like a narrative sleight of hand, meant to distract us from the fact that, with no original manuscript, we will never know how it was written. Obscured by a blizzard of unanswered questions and hypothetical experiences, Emily appears just as she did in her self-portraits: with her back to us, a subject who does not want to be known.

Quoting Julian Barnes, Lutz prefaces This Dark Night by asserting that all biography is ‘a collection of holes tied together with a string’, and that ‘with Emily Brontë this is doubly true’. However, whether a biographer succeeds depends entirely on how she chooses to bridge the gaps. Were it only that Lutz relied too heavily on conjecture about what Emily saw or felt, it would merely be a frustrating book; but because her speculation extends to how Emily washed and with what material she managed her menstruation, it is a fundamentally flawed one. Never mind that no biographer of a male author would think to ask how he trimmed his nasal hair or applied his haemorrhoid cream, Lutz seems to have forgotten that her subject is the sublime poet who wrote: ‘I am happiest when most away / I can bear my soul from its home of clay’. She can look for Emily in her slop pails as much as she likes. She will not find her there.

Virginia Woolf wrote that ‘there is no “I” in Wuthering Heights’, but she could equally have written that there was no ‘I’ in Emily Brontë. Like the bluebell, which Emily called a sacred watcher, she observed the world unhindered by the blot of the self – saw it as if from the falcon’s untethered eye, as if from some far-flung perch in the boundless universe.

It is no wonder she remains so elusive.