20 August 2026

An even colder Wuthering Heights

Much of what we know about Emily Brontë’s life is jarring – but was she really a disciple of the Marquis de Sade?

Illustration by Sophia Martineck

So little is known about Emily Jane Brontë’s private inner life and her largely sequestered outer life that her biographers have been led into a maze of speculation. Some of this borders on the wildly (but nevertheless possible) improbable, featuring local farmhand lovers or excessive intimacy with her brother, Branwell.

Lucasta Miller in The Brontë Myth (2002) offered a survey of how stories about Emily and the Brontë family developed and altered over the decades and analysed the evolution of extreme interpretations of Emily’s only novel, Wuthering Heights. Unlike her sister Charlotte, Emily wrote few letters and of those very little has survived: her three brief letters to Ellen Nussey (more Charlotte’s friend than hers) are terse and uninformative. Her surviving diary notes have been analysed again and again for clues but have little to give except a domestic tale of pet animals, ironing and picking blackcurrants: when the servants were ill, Emily often took the role of household manager (those blackcurrants offer a peculiarly and unusually cheering note). Nussey later commented on how readers would latch on to any detail, however small, to fill out their imaginings of the lives of these celebrated authors, and Miller reminds us that “the few anecdotal glimpses we get of [Emily] have her literally running away at the sight of strangers”. And so literary history has continued to elaborate and hypothesise and clutch at straws.

Deborah Lutz, in her new full-length biography, is confronted by a lack of fresh hard information and an ever-growing fog of fantasy generated by popular successes such as the singer-songwriter Kate Bush in 1978 with her invocation of cruel Heathcliff, “my only master”, and the new Emerald Fennell movie starring Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie.

Lutz is obliged to rely for much of her text on minute detail and what might be called trivia, but fortunately she is good at minutiae and knows much about 19th-century arts and crafts and writing materials. She has made herself patiently familiar with the famous little books of “Gondal” juvenilia and describes their physical appearance in detail: their composition, the paper on which they were written, the inks and the pens which the sisters employed to create them, the desks they wrote on. She is equally at home with the domestic details of daily life at the parsonage (sewage, toilets, the view of the moon from the outside privy, the composition of Victorian sanitary towels) and writes well of the age’s obsession with mourning and commemorative hair jewellery. There was much mourning and there were many deaths at Haworth Parsonage, and here Lutz draws on her earlier research into the objects in the Brontë cabinet and her 2014 study of Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture. The colour of Anne Brontë’s own hair has been discussed and disputed, notably by Samantha Ellis in her life of Anne, Take Courage (2017).

Unlike Charlotte, Emily had no close friends except her sister Anne, with whom she created the imaginary world of Gondal, which survives (although half-hidden) in her published poetry. It is surprising to read that she and Anne were still playing out adolescent Gondal fantasies in 1845 when they were well past childhood: Emily records how they retreated into this world and invented new stories on a train journey to York for a rare and brief holiday from Haworth when Emily was 27 and Anne 25. We know that Charlotte, equally engrossed when young by the world of “Angria”, which she invented with Branwell, grew to be embarrassed by and ashamed of her youthful obsessions, and tried to root them out of her imagination and her poetry, but Emily did not abandon her inner world.

And what a strange world it is, of prisons and dungeons and deaths and corpses, of violence and sadomasochistic fantasies, a world which in some ways echoes the more realistically located Yorkshire psychodrama of Wuthering Heights, with its many acts of violence against man and animal. Lutz is non-judgmental about Emily’s psychic adventures, but she does (albeit in a footnote) make the astonishing suggestion that Emily could possibly, just possibly, have seen a copy of the Marquis de Sade’s Justine. Her reasoning behind this proposal is convoluted but revealing, and reminds us that Lutz also published a book on erotica and Victorian sex rebels.

Emily’s interest in cruelty, necrophilia and morbidity has been noted by other critics, and she appears as a subject in a 1957 collection of essays on evil by the French philosopher Georges Bataille, along with Baudelaire, Genet, Kafka and De Sade. But Lutz carries this association slightly further in her footnote. The main-text allusion to Justine appears when Lutz describes the sketches in Emily’s translation of Horace which portray “sadomasochistic and murderous scenarios not pertinent to the text” – knives, canes, beatings, corpses, beheadings. “Could she have been reading the Marquis de Sade’s La Nouvelle Justine?” Lutz speculates: “Emily had an attraction for these sorts of depictions of brutality and violence, as did Charlotte… flogging features in many of Charlotte’s Angrian writing, and she describes it with relish and humour.” The footnote expands this suggestion: “It’s unlikely she would have been able to access the book, published in 1797, though some of her contemporaries in West Yorkshire owned copies, like Richard Monkton Milnes… There may have been a copy in Ponden Hall’s vast library, from which the Brontës probably borrowed books…” Ponden Hall is frequently cited as the original of Thrushcross Grange in Wuthering Heights, and according to Juliet Barker, painstaking chronicler of the Brontë family, it has often been suggested that “the young Brontës spent hours browsing through these libraries… [but] it has not been proven… that the Brontës ever used them at all, let alone on a regular basis”. And even if they had used them, is it likely that Emily would have browsed through the pages of De Sade?

A more likely suspect for local ownership of this volume is Monkton Milnes, who lived at Fryston Hall, which housed a considerable library of erotica dubbed “Aphrodisiopolis”: this stately home was familiar to the respectable Mrs Gaskell and Christina Rossetti, as well as to more suspect characters like Charles Swinburne and Richard Burton, but we cannot think that Mrs Gaskell spent her evenings there reading De Sade, or that Justine would ever have made her way to Haworth Parsonage. (Swinburne, perhaps not incidentally, was an admirer of Wuthering Heights.)

Lutz goes a step too far in her speculations, but nevertheless these connections are intriguing. Fryston Hall, like Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre, was to burn down in 1876, and most of its notorious library was destroyed. Fires were frequent at this period: Patrick Brontë had good cause to fear fire at the parsonage, and good reason to insist on his daughters wearing clothing made of flameproof materials. Richard Holmes tells us, in his recent life of the young Tennyson, that in an unexplained incident the cook “caught fire in the kitchen and was burned to death”. This happened in the rectory at Somersby, Tennyson’s birthplace: such tragedies were not uncommon.

How much of De Sade is there in Emily? Or indeed in all of us? It is not a great leap from Heathcliff’s “Had I been born where laws are less strict and tastes less dainty, I should treat myself to a slow vivisection of those two [young Cathy and Linton], as an evening’s amusement” to De Sade’s “How sensual is the act of destruction!”. But a possible literary connection seems tenuous in the extreme. The necrophilia, so prominent in Emily’s novel and in her poetry, is far more mainstream. Lutz doesn’t cite here, though she does in her book on the Victorian way of death, these distressing lines from Charles Wesley’s “Funeral Hymn”:

Ah! lovely Appearance of Death,
No Sight upon Earth is so fair;
Not all the gay Pageants that breathe,
Can with a dead Body compare.

These sentiments, unlike De Sade’s, were theologically acceptable. It was the erotic component of Heathcliff’s attachment to Catherine’s dead body that caused offence.

Lutz makes up for the lack of any new information by a good deal of guesswork, not all of it as provocative as her thoughts about De Sade. The words “surely”, “no doubt” and “probably” recur with ominous frequency. Phrases like “Gothic creepiness” and sentences such as “[Emily’s] reunion with Anne and her dog Keeper must’ve been especially sweet” are somewhat jarring. Lutz highlights small but baffling mysteries, such as the sex of Anne’s spaniel Flossy, who appears at times to be male, at times to be female, and she is intrigued by what she calls Emily’s “personal orthography”, by which she means her bad spelling. The Brontë sisters were not good at spelling, a professional weakness, surely, in young women obliged to be governesses.

Lutz makes a case for Emily’s use of the word “whach” for “watch”, a persistent misspelling: one of her chapters is called “The Sacred Whacher”. The “sacred whacher” here is a bluebell drawing its power from its ephemerality. Lutz, as biographer, has drawn close to her subject and watched over her and with her, through words and artefacts, and it is always interesting to read about this enigmatic and evasive figure. But are we any the wiser at the end of the book? Not really. Though I won’t forget the Whacher.

This Dark Night: The Life of Emily Brontë
Deborah Lutz
Bloomsbury Continuum, 352pp, £20

[Further reading: Claudia Rankine’s new visions]