Deborah Lutz

Professional Bio

Deborah Lutz’s scholarship focuses on Victorian literature, material culture, the history of sexuality, gender and LGBTQ+ studies, and the history of the book. She is the author of six books, and her newest one, This Dark Night: Emily Brontë, A Life, will be published in 2026. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation at the Huntington Library, and the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. She is also a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. Her writing has appeared in numerous journals, including the New York Times. She has been interviewed by the New York Times, the History Channel, National Public Radio, and other venues. She has been invited to speak at the Smithsonian, the New York Public Library, Oxford University, University of London, and elsewhere.

Her book Victorian Paper Art and Craft: Writers and Their Materials (Oxford UP, 2022) considers how authors used the materials of writing (and of reading and handcraft) for inspiration, experimentation, and creative composition. In doing so, Lutz recasts the sensory history of working on and with paper. The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects (Norton) uses artifacts that belonged to the Brontës (hair jewelry, desks, walking sticks, needlework, and more) to tell a history of intimacy. What results is an account of women’s work in the home (including the labor of writing) and of close, collaborative relations between sisters. The book was shortlisted for the PEN/Weld Award for Biography. Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture (Cambridge UP) analyzes the collecting and revering of the artifacts and personal effects of the dead as affirmations that objects held memories and told stories. The love of these keepsakes in the 19th century speaks of an intimacy with the body and death almost lost to us today.

Her first two books were The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the 19th-Century Seduction Narrative (Ohio State UP, 2006) and Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism (Norton, 2011). She is the editor of two Norton Critical Editions—Jane Eyre and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. She received her PhD from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.