Both Emily Brontë and her only novel Wuthering Heights have been called “deranged”, “crazed” or (especially online, in the wake of the recent film) “unhinged”. So it’s a relief to read a biography where she comes across, instead, as more grounded, steady, sane. Deborah Lutz, whose 2015 book The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects made such an impression, anchors her narrative in solid things: the too-short bed Emily squeezed herself into; the pockets she stuffed with paper, pencils and moorland treasures; the laundry she looked after, including stockings with “AB5” sewn into them to indicate they were her sister Anne’s fifth pair. Lutz’s Emily is an eminently practical woman who wrote “while baking, in front of a peat fire perched on a little stool, or while walking” and who “used the tactile keeping of order as a prop and prompt to lose herself in the sublimity of art-making and moor-haunting”.

For Lutz, Emily’s writing is also “tactile”. She counts the sampler Emily made at 10 as one of her “earliest extant writings”, and while other scholars have dismissed it as a collection of copied platitudes, Lutz notices that one line Emily stitched, from Proverbs – “Who hath gathered the wind in his fists?” – suggests that maybe she was already thinking about wuthering. She lovingly describes the little books the Brontë children made as “delightful, tiny objects to match their toys and still-small selves, texts holding secretive and insular qualities”. She calls the one-page diaries Emily made with Anne “a new writing practice, one that feels distinctly modern, even avant garde”, as they crammed in descriptions of their cooking, their chatter, their animals, their made-up heroines; stream of consciousness nearly a century before Virginia Woolf.

The wilder stories get an airing too, but Lutz doesn’t sensationalise them, or make them the key to everything; she doesn’t seem to see Emily as an impossible riddle, as most biographers have. Did Emily get bitten by a rabid dog and rush into the kitchen, seize an iron from the fire and cauterise the wound herself? Yes, but in doing so she was following the medical advice of the day. Did she cultivate “inwardness”? Yes, but there are no posthumous armchair diagnoses here, more an understanding that a writer managing a busy house might want to get good at preserving her own imaginative space. Did Emily get into some kind of romantic trouble with a working-class man (or woman) at 16? Possibly – but her fine writing about love across class divides could also have been inspired by her parents’ marriage. Did she have an affair with another female teacher in her job at Law Hill school? Maybe, but Lutz is more interested in the idea that Emily might have learned from Anne Lister, the real-life Gentleman Jack who lived nearby, to develop “androgyny and boldness”. I only found it a slight shame that Lutz included the story of Emily beating up her dog Keeper, which I suspect was invented by Charlotte’s first biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell.

Lutz has previously written about Victorian mourning ritual, and she is excellent on the intimacy of Emily’s writing about grief. She wonders if watching her mother spend seven months “in a liminal state – almost dead but still with the living” is why Emily’s work teemed with graves, and with “the terrible passion of the gloomy aggrieved still above earth”. She calls Wuthering Heights “one of the greatest haunted-house stories ever written”. She feelingly describes how a vault was built to bury Emily’s mother inside the church, and how Emily saw it reopened for one sister, then another, and then her brother – which makes Heathcliff’s obsessive desire to dig up Catherine’s grave and, later, to merge with her under the earth, seem less bizarre.

By locating Emily firmly in what she calls the texture of her everyday, Lutz reads Wuthering Heights not as (per the film) a crazed bodice-ripper, drunk on its own style, but a virtuoso debut novel from an author who had honed her craft since childhood and developed her own idiosyncratic creative process. This biography is, also, a wonderful book for writers on how to write the stories only you can, in snatched pockets of time if you have to, and against impossible odds. Lutz uses Charlotte’s correspondence with potential publishers to try to trace the way Emily wrote and rewrote her novel, speculating that she began with an “inner core of drama” after which “a backstory [was] built out” and then finally a frame was added, “ensnaring the narrative”. This attention to process is a refreshing change from the idea that she simply blurted it on to the page and had no idea what she had done.

On the billion dollar question of whether there is a lost second novel, Lutz seems pretty certain Emily was writing one, perhaps inspired by political upheaval in Europe. She even lets us dream that Emily might have stashed it in a wall at her house (as Lister did with her scandalous diary) or buried it on the moors from where – perhaps – it might one day be disinterred.