Anne Brontë (1820–1849)

I was totally spellbound by The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the second and final novel of Anne Bronte. This Victorian story opens in a rural community that has it’s focus on the newest arrival, a young widow, Helen Graham, who has taken up the tenancy at Wildfell Hall with her young son. As the community tried to unravel the truth behind Helen’s background, malicious gossip and innuendo arises accusing her of being an immoral woman. A local gentleman farmer, Gilbert Markham, finds himself show more becoming more enamoured by the widow and although they have obviously formed an attachment, he is frustrated by her resistance to his romantic advances and torn by jealousy. When she finally allows him to read about her life from her diary her troubled past is revealed.

Helen’s previous life had been ruled by her alcoholic adulterous husband who made her life a living hell and seemed bent on teaching her son to follow in his debauchery. The book gives the reader a clear look at Victorian sensibilities, and although extremely shocking at the time of publication, has been lauded over the years for exposing the hypocrisy of hiding away scandals for appearance sake. I cannot imagine trying to live up to the ridge code of behaviour that was applied to Victorian women.

I loved this story and grew to admire Helen immensely. Gilbert, on the other hand, although far better than her husband, was not my idea of the perfect man as he exhibited a childish, petulant side with a wicked temper. The story is told in an epistolary manner as Gilbert writes to a friend and then the pages of Helen’s diary. I got totally caught up in this revealing early feminist novel that was quite simply an exquisite read. show less

Apparently, the main reason Anne Brontë's masterpiece is not as well known as her sisters' is that Charlotte suppressed any new editions after her death, as the novel was deemed extremely shocking for its time. This is very unfortunate, as The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is much better than Anne's previous book, Agnes Grey, better even than Emily's Wuthering Heights, and nearly as good as Charlotte's Jane Eyre. Like Jane Eyre, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall examines the roles of reason and passion show more in life and concludes that both are necessary to achieve happiness. More specifically, Wildfell Hall is about how to judge other people's characters, particularly in matters of love. These themes are brilliantly dramatized through a story about a woman who makes a youthful, but profound, error in whom she chooses to marry, and as her husband's vicious nature becomes increasingly clear, struggles to leave him---and how she herself is unfairly judged by her new neighbors when she manages to do so. (While I'm sure Anne didn't intend it this way, given her Christian piety, the novel could be read as a good argument for liberal divorce laws and the wisdom of cohabitation before marriage.)

Many people sharply contrast the romanticism of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre with the realism of Wildfell Hall, but this is a mistake---and, despite its more frank depictions of some of the social problems of its time (including alcoholism and domestic abuse), Anne rejected this dichotomy in the novel itself:

"'But romantic notions will not do: I want her to have true notions.'

"'Very right: but in my judgment, what the world stigmatises as romantic, is often more nearly allied to the truth than is commonly supposed; for, if the generous ideas of youth are too often over-clouded by the sordid views of after-life, that scarcely proves them to be false.'"

This is related to the broader theme about the dichotomy of reason and passion, which she also rejects, so that analysis more or less misses the whole point of the novel.

Like Jane Eyre (and to a lesser extent Wuthering Heights), The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is an intellectual and emotional tour de force, and one of the greatest classics in all of world literature. It's a real tragedy that Anne died even younger than her sisters before she could write anything else. Four and a half stars. show less

Unexpected and involving -- this is the first novel I've read by "the other Bronte", and it was both a big surprise and an engrossing read. Anne Bronte, of course was the youngest of the Bronte sisters; she wrote two novels before her death at the age of 29. She has nothing like the literary reputation of her two sisters, Emily and Charlotte. Some would argue that had something to do with Charlotte's comments after Anne's death, but it also reflects a very different style.

For me, the show more surprise in "Agnes Grey" was how little it reminded me of the work of Charlotte and Emily. There's much in common (especially with Charlotte), most of which reflects the Brontes' own lives -- an initial setting in Yorkshire, a close if impoverished clerical family background, a strongly moral view of life. But "Agnes" is far less dramatic than the works of the elder Brontes, far more concerned with social distinctions, and far more focussed on marriage. The mood is very different; realistic rather than romantic, and social rather than isolated. And the style is also very different; very clear, very objective, and decidedly (part of the time) ironic.

All in all, "Agnes Grey" reminds me more of Jane Austen than of the elder Brontes, especially the Jane of "Mansfield Park". Like Fanny Brice in "Mansfield", Anne Bronte's Agnes is an outsider and social inferior in her milieu, and is also much involved with personal morality. She can in fact lapse into priggishness, but not too often, and there are hints of potentially radical social views beneath the mid- Victorian morality. Many of the minor characters (particularly the nasty ones) are one dimensional, but the dimension is brilliantly sketched out.

For me, this was an engrossing read, and I would recommend it to readers who enjoy Victorian literature, but have not yet experienced Anne Bronte. I shall put her other novel, "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" on my to-read list. show less

As a Victorianist, I was of course made to read a lot of Brontë novels in undergrad and grad school, either in coursework or beyond: Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, The Professor, Villette. But they were all by Emily or Charlotte... never Anne! Bu I did once pick up a copy of Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and have finally gotten around to reading it.

I was familiar with Kate Beaton's "Dude Watchin' with the Brontës," which tells us that marrying alcoholic brooding men with no show more emotional intelligence was a thing that Emily and Charlotte were into, but not Anne, and indeed, that's basically the thesis of Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Our protagonist is a gentleman farmer who gets a new neighbor, a woman with a daughter; he's attracted to her but she's mysterious. Eventually she tells him the story of her first marriage, which was quite terrible. It's easy to read this as what it really might be like to be married to, say, Heathcliff. Then everything works out. It's definitely more pious than the works of Charlotte or Emily, and I don't know that it was more to my actual taste than Jane Eyre, which probably beats it for character complexity. But it, despite being a bit on the slow side, certainly wasn't as boring as The Professor or Villette.

So I am glad I finally read it, and I intend to seek out Anne's other novel now, but I doubt I will ever become a superfan of any of the Brontës, as influential as they all are. show less