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 reverberated throughout Victorian England," said suffragist May Sinclair in 1913.

Alas, however, feminism seems not to be the primary underpinning of this novel. That would be the strict and melancholy Christianity practiced by the protagonist and perhaps by Anne Brontë as well. It is no surprise, therefore, that at the end of the novel, with the caddish husband having died of his dissipation, Helen is free to marry the man she has come to love and, one assumes, to leave behind the unconventional life of a feminist icon. 

It is telling that the first section of the novel is told in letters written by Helen's future husband (the good one), the central section is in Helen's voice, pages from her diary, but then, in the third and final section we're placed back in the hands of the man. The structure of the novel—letters-diary-letters—calls attention to itself. That makes it hard to ignore that the story only reaches a resolution when it is placed back in the hands of a male character, though to be sure, that is complicated by the fact that that man was written by a woman.

This is Anne Brontë's second novel. I'm not overly eager to read her first, Agnes Grey.

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