A Biography of British Writer Emily Jane Brontë (1818-1848)

FAIN: FZ-292546-23

Deborah Lutz
University of Louisville (Louisville, KY 40292-0001)

Research and writing leading to a biography of famed English novelist, Emily Brontë (1818-1848).

This new biography of Brontë, the first major one in over twenty years, will be grounded in an investigation of Brontë’s MSS and personal effects, a surprisingly understudied collection. This is especially true of her tiny poetry manuscripts; no other scholar has fully explored these works with and on paper, their visual and textual qualities. Other Brontë material leftovers mostly ignored by scholars—desks, pens, books, etc.—open Brontë’s sensory world, the felt textures of her hours. Her creative process, her performative approach to her craft, and her confidence in her strange art emerge from these artifacts. Brontë’s identification with outsiders and rebels appears in her fiction, and will shape this biography, especially her historical intersection with LGBTQ history, race, slavery, and early environmental concerns. Wayward, errant, at odds with the given, Brontë deserves a retelling of her life that elaborates, augments, and fully reveals her place in the archive, in history.