The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a powerful and sometimes violentnovel of expectation, love. oppression, sin, religion and betrayal.It portrays the disintegration of the marriage of HelenHuntingdon, the mysterious 'tenant' of the title, and herdissolute, alcoholic husband. Defying convention, Helen leavesher husband to protect their young son from his father'sinfluence, and earns her own living as an artist. Whilst in hidingat Wildfell Hall, she encounters Gilbert Markham. who falls inlove with her.
　　On its first publication in 1848, Anne Brontë's second novel was criticised for being 'coarse' and 'brutal'. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall challenges the social conventions of the early nineteenth century in a strong defence of women's rights in the face of psychological abuse from their husbands. Anne Brontë's style is bold, naturalistic and passionate, and this novel, which her sister Charlotte considered 'an entire mistake', has earned her a position in English Literature in her own right，not just as the youngest member of the Bronte family.
　　This newly reset text is taken from a copy on the 1848 second editionin the Library o[ the Bronte' Parsonage Musel~m and has been editedto correct known errors in that edition.

Book Description
This work is a sometimes violent and brutal tale of love and betrayal, separation and reconciliation, set in the familiar Bronte landscape of bleak houses in moorland settings. This new edition is taken from the 1848 second edition of the text, with corrections made to that text.

From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Erica Bauermeister
Of the three Bronte sisters, Emily and Charlotte are better known, yet it is Anne's work which carries some of the strongest feminist themes. In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall a devout young woman named Helen falls in love with a man who is handsome, but whose values are questionable; willing to believe she can alter his character, she marries him. Her marriage becomes a misery she has no power to change until she devises a bold plan to take control. Her story comes through two voices - her own and that of Gilbert Markham, a man who falls in love with Helen later in her life - and is told through journals and letters written over a period of time. Because of the privacy and immediacy of these narratives, the reader sees personal changes and attitudes Helen and Gilbert are often unaware of at the time: we witness Helen's first naive protestations of passion for her husband and follow her through her eventual disillusionment; we recognize Gilbert's early, unconscious egotism. While the plot continues and mysteries are unraveled, what Helen and Gilbert say - as well as what they don't say - provides another story to follow, which reinforces Anne Bronte's indictment of the sexual double standards of nineteenth-century Britain.

The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
Novel by Anne Bronte (writing under the pseudonym Acton Bell), first published in three volumes in 1848. This epistolary novel presents a portrait of debauchery that is remarkable in light of the author's sheltered life. It is the story of young Helen Graham's disastrous marriage to the dashing drunkard Arthur Huntingdon--said to be modeled on the author's wayward brother Branwell--and her flight from him to the seclusion of Wildfell Hall. Pursued by Gilbert Markham, who is in love with her, Graham refuses him and, by way of explanation, gives him her journal. There he reads of her wretched married life. Eventually, after Huntingdon's death, they marry.

From AudioFile
Helen Graham has taken up residence in the bleak Wildfell Hall with her young son to escape her alcoholic and philandering husband. The story is narrated both by Helen and the man who falls in love with her. Frederick Davidson and Nadia May take the roles of the storytellers, and they do an excellent job of portraying both the male and female voices. May reads Helen's diary and correspondence. May's voice is young, fresh and naive, well-suited to Helen as a young woman; the voices of the men are excellent as well. Her laughter sounds genuine, and her portrayal of drunken men is perfect. She moves the narrative along crisply, with just the right touch of drama. Davidson's voicing is also excellent, but he tends to overdramatize at times, and his tempo is just a shade too fast. The choice to use both male and female narrators was a good one, enlivening the story and underlining the differences between the sexes in Victorian England. S.S.R.

About Author
Anne Bronte was born at Thornton, Yorkshire, on January 17, 1820. She was the sixth and youngest child of Reverend Patrick Bronte, an Irishman by birth, and Maria Branwell Bronte, who was from a prosperous Cornish family. Following her mother's death in 1821, Anne and four sisters and one brother were raised by an aunt, Elizabeth Branwell. The two eldest daughters, Maris and Elizabeth, died in 1825 from tuberculosis contracted at the religious boarding school to which they had been sent.

Anne spent her childhood and formative years in the isolated parsonage at Haworth, Yorkshire, where her father was curate. The Bronte children all thrived in fantasy worlds that drew on their voracious reading of Byron, Scott, and Shakespeare as well as The Arabian Nights and gothic fiction. Anne and Emily worked together on a saga about the fictitious island of Gondal while Charlotte and brother Branwell wrote melodramatic chronicles centered around the imaginary kingdom of Angria. In 1836 Anne entered Miss Wooler's School at Roe Head, Charlotte and Emily's alma mater, but withdrew the next year because of illness.

Financial considerations forced Anne to seek employment as a governess. In 1839 she arrived at Blake Hall in Mirfield to tutor the children of Joshua Ingham, a local squire and magistrate. From 1841 to 1845 she was governess at Thorpe Green, the home of Reverend Edmund Robinson located twelve miles from York. In 1843 Branwell Bronte also found work as a tutor at Thorpe Green until suspicions of an illicit relationship with his employer's wife resulted in dismissal. Branwell's gradual descent into alcoholism, drug addiction, and madness is reflected in the writings of all three sisters, particularly in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

The Brontes launched their literary careers in 1846 with a collection of verse published pseudonymously as Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. In 1847 Anne's first novel, Agnes Grey, was published in a volume together with Emily's Wuthering Heights. Based on Anne's experiences as a governess, it exposed the desperate plight of unmarried, educated women driven to take up the only respectable career open to them. Though critic George Moore, perhaps Anne's greatest champion, later deemed it 'the most perfect prose narrative in English literature,' the work was overshadowed by the intense originality of Wuthering Heights, not to mention the enormous success of Charlotte's Jane Eyre, which had appeared a few weeks earlier.

Anne continued writing; her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, came out in 1848. The bold story of a strong-minded woman's struggle for independence, the book unmasked the dark brutality of Victorian chauvinism but was nevertheless attacked by some critics as a celebration of the very excesses it criticized. Charlotte Bronte, as she later revealed in the 'Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell' (1850), was especially disturbed by it: 'The choice of subject was an entire mistake. Nothing less congruous with the writer's nature could be conceived. The motives which dictated this choice were pure, but, I think, slightly morbid.'

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall reminded other reviewers of Wuthering Heights, and it quickly went to a second printing. 'Every reader who has felt the power of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights comes, sooner or later, to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,' wrote Bronte scholar Margaret Lane. 'Anne Bronte, with all the Bronte taste for violence and drama, and with her experience of the same rude scenes and savage Yorkshire tales that had fed the imaginations of her sisters, did not shrink. She used the material at hand, and shaped it with singular honesty and seriousness. . . . [One] discovers from Wildfell Hall that Anne is a true Bronte.'

The final months of Anne Bronte's life were filled with tragedy. Both Branwell and Emily died of tuberculosis in the autumn of 1848. Anne Bronte succumbed to the same illness at Scarborough on May 28, 1849.

Book Dimension :
length: (cm)19.8 　　　 　　　　　 　　　　　 width:(cm)12.6

Anne Bront?

Anne Bront? (January 17, 1820 – May 28, 1849) was a British novelist and poet, the youngest of the Bront? literary family.

She was born in the village of Thornton, Yorkshire, England, the last of six siblings. Anne's mother, Maria Branwell Bront?, died of cancer a year later in 1821, after the family had moved to Haworth where her father, Patrick Bront?, was appointed perpetual curate. While she was a child her two eldest siblings, Maria and Elizabeth died of tuberculosis and much has been written about the influence of these deaths on her and her siblings and how it may have affected their later writings. Two of her sisters, Charlotte and Emily, were also authors and poets. Anne's poetry was published, along with that of her sisters, in 1846, under the pseudonym "Acton Bell".

Shortly after the deaths of her brother Branwell and sister Emily in the winter of 1848, Anne Bront? died at the seaside resort of Scarborough, England, where she had gone to convalesce after a prolonged illness. She was buried there at Saint Mary's Churchyard.

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
To J.IIALFORD, FSQ.
　1 A Discovery
　2 An Interview
　3 A Controversy
　4 The Party
　5 The Studio
　6 Progression
　7 The Excursion
　8 The Present
　9 A Snake in the Grass
　10 A Contract and a Quarrel
　11 The Vicar Again
　12 A TEtE-A-TEte and a Discovery
　13 A Return to Duty
　14 An Assault
　15 An Encounter and its Consequences
　16 The Warnings of Experience
　17 Further Warnings
　18 The Miniature
　19 An Incident
　20 Persistence
　21 Opinions
　22 Traits of Friendship
　23 First Weeks of Matrimony
　24 First Quarrel
　25 First Absence
　26 The Guests
　27 A Misdemeanor
　28 Parental Feelings
　29 The Neighbour
　30 Domestic Scenes
　31 Social Virtues
　32 Comparisons: Information Rejected
　33 Two Evenings
　34 Concealment
　35 Provocations
　36 Dual Solitude
　37 The Neighbour Again
　38 The lnjured Man
　39 A Scheme of Escape
　40 A Misadventure
　41 Hope Springs Eternal in the Human Breast"
　42 A Reformation
　43 The Boundary Past
　44 The Retreat
　45 Reconciliation
　46 Friendly Counsels
　47 Startling Intelligence
　48 Further Intelligence
　49 The Rain Descended"
　50 L Doubts and Disappointments
　51 LI An Unexpected Occurrence
　52 LlI Fluctuations
　53 LIII Conclusion
NOTES