The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë
Mary A, Ward , who wrote under her married name, Mrs. Humphry Ward and founded the Women's National Anti-Suffrage League, takes great pains to tell us in her introduction to this edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall , that Anne Brontë is not the writer that her sisters, Emily and Charlotte were. She's not wrong. The novel starts out well enough. We meet the mysterious tenant, a woman living alone with her young son in the dilapidated hall of the title and supporting herself by her art. That her life is hard, but that she is making it, in a way that few ladies did in those times, is the first evidence we have that this might be, as it has been called, the first feminist novel. When we learn more about her backstory, that she had deserted her cad of a husband and is hiding out from him for fear that he will take the child from her, this characterization of the book seems even more apt. "The slamming of [the protagonist Helen's] bedroom door against her husband re...