The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
by Anne Brontë
Summary
Helen Graham arrives at the crumbling Wildfell Hall as a mysterious young widow with a small son and a talent for painting she supports herself by selling, and her reserve and independence scandalise the neighbourhood, particularly the farmer Gilbert Markham, who falls for her while suspecting the worst about her past. The novel is told largely through Gilbert's letters to a friend, which frame Helen's own diary, handed to him at last to explain herself, and the diary reveals a marriage to Arthur Huntingdon, a charming man who curdles into an alcoholic, serially unfaithful husband determined to corrupt their son into his own image. Helen's decision to flee with the boy, taking only what she can earn by her own work, was a direct challenge to the law of the time, under which a wife's property, her earnings and her child legally belonged to her husband. Huntingdon's slow physical and moral collapse, nursed by Helen out of duty rather than love, ends in his death, and Helen is finally free to marry Gilbert as an equal rather than a rescuer.
Anne Bronte writes Huntingdon's alcoholism and cruelty with an unflinching, specific honesty that shocked its first readers far more than anything in her sisters' novels, and a bookseller's fair warning is due: the middle section, Huntingdon's diary of dissipation, is genuinely bleak reading, deliberately so, since Anne stated she wrote it to show the truth rather than soften it for comfort.
Published under the pseudonym Acton Bell in 1848, it sold well immediately but was withdrawn from print in England after Anne's death the following year.
Historical Context & Significance
Reviewers in 1848 were split: Charles Kingsley in Fraser's Magazine allowed that society owed the book thanks for exposing an ugly hypocritical reality even as he objected to its coarseness, while The Spectator condemned what it called a morbid love for the coarse, and Sharpe's London Magazine warned female readers away from it as dangerous despite its powerful interest. Charlotte Bronte later blocked its republication in England, writing that Anne had not been qualified to handle the subject, a decision biographers now read as an attempt to protect her sister's reputation by her own more conventional standards, and the novel went unavailable in Britain, though not America, until 1854, and circulated afterward in a text cut and rearranged by its publisher until Oxford's 1992 Clarendon edition restored the original.
Twentieth century critics reversed the earlier verdict decisively: Anne Bronte is now often called an early realist voice in British fiction, and Stevie Davies described the novel in 1996 as a feminist manifesto of revolutionary power. Arthur Huntingdon's decline is thought to draw on the Brontes' own brother Branwell, whose alcoholism the family witnessed firsthand.