The Brontë Cabinet

An intimate portrait of the lives and writings of the Brontë sisters, drawn from the objects they possessed.

"The Brontë Cabinet is full of illuminating and original insights, bringing aspects of the Brontës' lives into sharp focus for the first time."

"The Brontë Cabinet does not fail to deliver, offering vivid interpretations of the lives and the works of these strange and fascinating sisters…"

"Deborah Lutz’s engaging new study proves that there is indeed room for fresh perspectives...All lovers of the Brontës should read this book."

"Full of interest…"

"This is a fine book, rich, immersive and illuminating, glowing with the life of the Brontës and their wild genius."

"In looking at the Brontës through their most precious possessions, Lutz lets us sneak a peek at their inner lives as well as their outer ones, in a sympathetic and informative way."

"...Lutz has found a way of teasing out some genuinely fresh insights into a subject that might otherwise feel as though it has been done to death."

"It [The Brontë Cabinet] is a dynamic, powerful and very accessible book, which abandons womb-to-tomb biography to look at the Brontës "through the 'eyes' of thread, paper, wood, jet, hair, bone, brass, fur, frond, leather, velvet, and ash"."

"Her [Lutz's] book is most fascinating not when it looks at the relics, the walking sticks and tiny shoes, but at the great mass of writerly and literary paraphernalia associated with the Brontës; the paperiness of their lives."

Deborah Lutz is the author of six books, including This Dark Night: Emily Brontë, A Life and The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects, which was shortlisted for the PEN/Weld Award for Biography. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library, and has twice been awarded National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships. She teaches Victorian literature and culture at Pennsylvania State University as the George and Barbara Kelly Professor in Nineteenth-Century English and American Literature. Past honors include fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Mellon Foundation. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Cabinet Magazine, and many other venues, and she is the editor of two Norton Critical Editions—Jane Eyre and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.