Time & Date
Doors open at 6:00 p.m. Please allot extra time to travel to CitySpace as there is a Red Sox game this evening which may impact traffic.
Event Location
WBUR CitySpace890 Commonwealth Avenue Boston, MA 02215Open in Google Maps
Ticket Price
$10.00–30.00
The gothic romance “Wuthering Heights,” Emily Brontë's only novel published in 1847, is having a renaissance due to Emerald Fennell’s new film adaptation starring Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie. Book sales have skyrocketed and the themes of class, racism and sexuality are being dissected across book clubs and group chats. Here & Now associate producer Kalyani Saxena moderates a conversation with Bronte biographer Deborah Lutz and WBUR film critic Sean Burns exploring the many interpretations the novel has inspired over the century. We’ll show photos and film clips to trace its evolution on screen.
Copies of Lutz’s biography, “This Dark Night: Emily Brontë, A Life” will be available to purchase from our bookstore partner Lovestruck Books and Lutz will sign following the conversation.
CitySpace Tickets
Premier: $30.00 (includes reserved seating in the front of the theater)
General: $20.00
BU Faculty/Staff: $15.00 (must present a valid BU ID upon arrival)
Student: $10.00 (must present a valid student ID upon arrival)
Ways To Save
WBUR’s Legacy Circle, Murrow Society, Sustainers and Members save $5.00 on tickets to this event. To apply the discount to your ticket purchase online, you’ll need to enter a promo code. You can get your code by emailing membership@wbur.org.
Registrants may be contacted by CitySpace about this or future events.
About “This Dark Night”
Deborah Lutz compellingly captures Emily Jane Brontë, extraordinary poet and author of the incomparable “Wuthering Heights,” with deep insight and glorious prose.
Emily Brontë (1818–1848) was only twenty-seven-years old when she began work on one of the most important novels in the English language. Two years later in 1847, she completed “Wuthering Heights.” It took the world almost a century to catch up to Brontë’s masterpiece, and it has taken even longer to know Brontë ― an elusive figure, with a ghostly legacy provoked by her early death and the loss (and likely destruction) of almost all her personal papers.
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.