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The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Penguin Classics) Paperback – Unabridged, June 1, 1996
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Gilbert Markham is deeply intrigued by Helen Graham, a beautiful and secretive young woman who has moved into nearby Wildfell Hall with her young son. He is quick to offer Helen his friendship, but when her reclusive behaviour becomes the subject of local gossip and speculation, Gilbert begins to wonder whether his trust in her has been misplaced. It is only when she allows Gilbert to read her diary that the truth is revealed and the shocking details of the disastrous marriage she has left behind emerge. Told with great immediacy, combined with wit and irony, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a powerful depiction of a woman's fight for domestic independence and creative freedom.
This Penguin Classics edition of Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, her groundbreaking study of a woman's valiant struggle for independence from an abusive husband, is edited with an introduction and notes by Stevie Davis. In her introduction Davies discusses The Tenant of Wildfell Hall as feminist testament, inspired by Anne Brontë's experiences as a governess and by the death of her brother Branwell Brontë, and examines the novel's language, biblical references and narrative styles.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
- Print length576 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin Classics
- Publication dateJune 1, 1996
- Reading age18 years and up
- Dimensions7.8 x 5.2 x 1.02 inches
- ISBN-109780140434743
- ISBN-13978-0140434743
- Lexile measure1190L
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- ASIN : 0140434747
- Publisher : Penguin Classics; Reprint edition (June 1, 1996)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 576 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780140434743
- ISBN-13 : 978-0140434743
- Reading age : 18 years and up
- Lexile measure : 1190L
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 7.8 x 5.2 x 1.02 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #57,125 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #579 in Gothic Fiction
- #2,026 in Classic Literature & Fiction
- #4,810 in Literary Fiction (Books)
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About the authors
Anne Brontë (17 January 1820 – 28 May 1849) was an English novelist and poet, the youngest member of the Brontë literary family.
At 19 she left Haworth and worked as a governess between 1839 and 1845. After leaving her teaching position, she fulfilled her literary ambitions. She published a volume of poetry with her sisters and two novels. Agnes Grey, based upon her experiences as a governess, was published in 1847. Her second and last novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which is considered to be one of the first sustained feminist novels, appeared in 1848. Like her poems, both her novels were first published under the masculine pen name of Acton Bell. Anne's life was cut short when she died of what is now suspected to be pulmonary tuberculosis at the age of 29.
Partly because the re-publication of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was prevented by Charlotte Brontë after Anne's death, she is not as well known as her sisters. However, her novels, like those of her sisters, have become classics of English literature.
(Derivative of "Anne Brontë", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Brontë, CC BY-SA 3.0)
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Within a few months Helen became much more familiar with her husband's character. He had no hobbies nor interests, as she did. She is a gifted painter, loves to read, enjoys the outdoors, and is not easily bored. Arthur demanded all Helen's time and attention, to entertain and pamper him. When he could no longer bear the country solitude, he left for London, to reacquaint himself with his old haunts and bachelor friends. He insisted his wife remain behind, at their estate, Grassdale Manor. Huntington's behavior worsened with time, even after Helen bore him a beautiful son. He brought his debauched friends into his home for months on end, hosting wild drinking orgies and participating in a variety of low behavior extremely insulting to his wife, indeed, even encouraging his friends to mock his spouse. Helen eventually discovered that one of the houseguests, the wife of a friend, was Arthur's longtime mistress. Thus a double adultery was being conducted at Grassdale Manor, while she and her son were in residence, along with excesses of every kind.
It was at this point that Helen, contrary to the customs of her times, locked her bedroom door against her husband. This seems like logical behavior in the 21st century. And many might ask why she did not leave Huntington long before. In the Victorian Age, the law and society defined a married woman as a husband's property. Women were totally dependant upon their mates, and husbands could actually have their wives locked away in asylums at their whim and convenience. There is a scene in the novel where Arthur has all Helen's paints and canvasses destroyed, and takes possession of her jewelry and money, so she cannot leave him. When the profligate begins to manipulate his young son, encouraging the child to drink and curse his mother, Helen does run away with her child.
As the novel opens, we find her living in a few rooms at the remote Wildfell Hall, under the assumed identity of Helen Graham, a widow. Here she earns her living by painting. The neighbors are curious and seek her out, one in particular, Gilbert Markham. However when Helen is not forthcoming about her past, she becomes the object of ugly gossip and jealousy. Much of this compelling story is narrated through a series of letters Markham writes to a friend, and through Helen's own diary entries.
The novel is divided into three sections: Helen's life at Wildfell Hall and her friendship with Gilbert Markham; Helen's diary describing the Huntington marriage; and the events following Markham's reading the diary. Anne Bronte's novel is powerful, haunting and quite disturbing. Miss Bronte, and her brother Branwell, served as governess and tutor to the children of wealthy aristocrats. Some of the behavior described here is apparently taken from events which Anne witnessed, and which marked Branwell severely. Ms. Bronte openly stated that in "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" she, "wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it." This well written, extraordinary tale can most definitely hold its own against the works of Anne's more famous sisters, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, and those of other noted authors of the period.
JANA
But having read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Wurthering Heights for the first time I’ll just note a perspective I found interesting.
In Dante’s Paradiso there is a well known passage where Beatrice has to step aside and Dante is accompanied to the highest heavens by the Blessed Virgin Mary. There is a pervasive theme that man was made for God and that earthly love is merely a preparation for the eternal.
The Brontes may have been a clergyman’s daughters, but they were not unthinking ones. Imbued with the romantic spirit of the nineteenth century, Anne Bronte explicitly wonders in the Tenant of Wildfell Hall how reuniting with one’s love in heaven can matter at all if the beatific vision is true. And Heathcliff in Wurthering Heights explicitly denies the desire for heaven: an eternity with Catherine is enough.
In short there is a clash between the very real joy moderns tend to feel with
their romantic beloved and the typical feeling of church as an obligation, often more of a drudgery. How could romantic love be so unimportant in heaven when it is so vital to life on earth?
And so the Brontes recast the traditional understanding of the Christian afterlife, if indeed their understanding is still Christian at all.
These are of course great works of art that go well beyond this theme, but this particularly struck me while reading them. Please feel free to disagree.
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Para quem quer conhecer este romance de Anne Brontë, recomendo esta edição, pois tem uma introdução e prefácio, que ajudam-nos a melhor compreender esta obra.
Reviewed in Spain on February 18, 2023
Para quem quer conhecer este romance de Anne Brontë, recomendo esta edição, pois tem uma introdução e prefácio, que ajudam-nos a melhor compreender esta obra.
Anne Bronte is sometimes regarded as the least of the Bronte siblings - like the third Beatle - rated even below her infamous brother Branwell. And yet the youngest sister was far more in touch with her time and its injustices than her more famous sisters. Where Charlotte is quite derogatory and unsympathetic about the mill workers in 'Shirley' and rather disparaging of the poor in general (Charlotte, though unable to vote since she had the misfortune of being born female, was a life long Tory supporter.), Anne portrays a far wider view, suggesting that people are mostly a product of their environment and that no one is hopelessly unreachable. Where Emily portrays love as a great destructive force that removes ones wit's, reason and accountability leaving the unfortunate possessor to crawl through all the darkest and most deplorable creases in the human soul, Anne suggests that love simply is and it is the use that is made of it which determines its ultimate outcome for good or ill. Charlotte and Branwell were unable to temper passion with reason. Charlotte - from reading her books, her excessive use of the word 'master' (the working title of The Professor was originally 'The Master' which is pretty shuddersome if you've read that book) her letters to Constatin Heger and to Ellen Nussey, wanted to give full unrestrained vent to her feelings and have another be responsible for reining her in. Branwell took this romantic masochism a step further after his affair with a married woman ended badly, going thoroughly to hell through drink, drugs and ultimately killing himself by ruining his health. Anne, meanwhile, may well have felt some affection towards a certain curate, but while Charlotte flirted with him outrageously, Anne was weighing up his character, reserving judgement on him until she saw whether he would make himself someone worthwhile with what he had be given. The young man in question unfortunately died less than a year later so the question was never answered. But it is astounding that Anne who was liberal minded, self possessed, hard working, ethical, sympathetic and impassioned to speak out against social injustices despite her own shyness, is somehow shuffled off to one side.
Agnes Grey successfully takes down the upper classes a peg or ten. It seemed on surface a simple novel and is often considered a far poorer imitation of Jane Eyre. (In fact it was written at least a year or more before Jane Eyre and Charlotte nicked Anne's idea!) It doesn't contain the sensational matter of Jane Eyre but it is more honest, drawn from life and there is evidence that it caused discussions on the poor treatment of governesses.
And then there's 'Tenant'.
In case my fellow Bronte enthusiasts don't know this, almost all other editions of this book have been hacked about and crudely cut. You've probably never read the book as it was originally published - no manuscript of the original now survives. This hacking happened after Anne's death in order cut printing costs (the publishers wanted to fit three volumes into a single book) and because Charlotte, the only Bronte sibling still alive at that point, was trying to carefully control her public image. She'd dealt with a lot of complaints and bad reviews on 'Tenant', which was selling well despite this, (and perhaps on some level she didn't want the competition, so she belittled the book - Charlotte did abhor Anne's second book, finding the subject matter distasteful) so she chopped the more inflammatory passages out. These passages include the suggestion that Arthur Huntingdon raped his wife, Helen, after too much alcohol. That when Helen found out he was having an affair, she considers a retaliatory affair of her own for two paragraphs - this is radical for Victorian writing. The framing narrative that shows how Gilbert Markham has changed and become a better man through his association with Helen, and how they have a partnership of equals, was also removed. In fact anything obviously controversial was cut and Helen is made out to be a mealy mouthed and rather anti social heroine instead of morally strong and very human. It is a crying shame because it means most people have only read a nonsensical neutered version. This penguin edition is as close as you can now get to the book Anne intended with her heroine, Helen Graham, fully human, powerful and full of agency. If you're considering a reread go for this edition - Stevie Davis has restored the original text as best she can and the uncut text is significantly different.
The story itself: Helen the MC, falls in love with a man who likewise loves her. Against the advice of her aunt she marries him. Worse, against the her own misgivings, she marries him. Arthur Huntingdon is not a charming reformed rake. Within a few short years of their marriage, he reveals himself as violent, unprincipled, controlling and a drunken narcissist. The last part is what's interesting. Anne Bronte clearly portrays a relationship that even in its very early stages is emotionally abusive and manipulative, long before such terms as 'toxic narcissist' and 'gaslighting' were invented. She shows clearly how you can fall in love with someone, brush away misgivings certain that you can save them from themselves (a toxic idea still pedalled to women even now) and find that all your hopes and plans were in vain. That love can truly be there at the beginning on both sides, and go horribly, irreparably wrong. And then there is a child involved, Helen's 5-yr-old son. Can I stress enough how unusual it is to have a mother as the heroine in 19th C literature? It just wasn't done. Okay so technically Cathy is a mother for 5mins in Wuthering Heights before Emily kills her off and keeps her as a ghost, allowing young Catherine to take the heroine's role. But in general it didn't happen. Anne not only puts a mother front and centre, she makes her an absolute tigress.
Now think about the time period. 'Tenant' is set between 1827 and 1847. The latter is when it was probably completed. Women over 30 got the vote in 1918. Women of 21 and over did not get the right to vote until 1928. The married woman's property act was not passed until 1882 (Nearly 40 yrs after the publication of 'Tenant'.) The tender years doctrine giving presumption of maternal custody of children until they reached 16, was passed in 1873.
Women had NO individual rights under the law and no one to appeal to in the 19th C. It was assumed that they were protected under their father's and then their husband's legal rights. In other words, we were chattel. So what happened if it was your husband you needed protection from? Unless you were very lucky and escaped, you had to lump it no matter how violent he was until either he went too far and killed you or you died by some other means or until he did. Even if you did escape, if you were found out you were legally compelled to return to your husband. Your children belonged to him. Your dowery, your fortune, everything you had upon getting married transferred to your husband upon marriage. (Check out Wilkie Collins The Woman in White for a better understanding of the legal wrangling.) Theoretically your husband could keep everything and throw you out of the house.
The reason I've banged on about all that is because this novel written when it was, was a piece of practical, radical feminism with a clear goal and courage behind it unlike anything seen by the keyboard hobbyists touting radical feminist views today. This was something that really needed to be addressed and a quiet, least regarded vicar's daughter from an out of the way Yorkshire milling town was the one who did it. The themes in 'Tenant' are as relevant today as they were when it was written. Anne doesn't write with the Byronic pyrotecnics and sensation of her sisters and I think this has led people to miss the point of her novels. In actual fact Anne's novels and 'Tenant' especially, speak far more of justice, equality and hope than Charlotte's ever could. She was not the least talented Bronte, she was the most morally courageous.