The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte (1848)

A beautiful, mysterious woman in a ruined mansion hides a painful past.

Book Review: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is its own book, just as Anne Bronte is her own author. The novel only skirts the edges of the Gothic tale, but is far too honest and realistic for Austenland. The characters in an Austen novel would take to their beds for a year with nervous apoplexy and the vapors if confronted with the scenes found here; Anne's characters persevere. But the story fits well somewhere between a more realistic Austen and a less Gothic Bronte. The portraits of dissipation and dalliance are so realistic that I kept expecting an even greater realism, but even a Bronte couldn't be that far ahead of her time. But Anne's take on the rights and place of wives and women seems far ahead of her time, making this book simultaneously a "feminist" tract, a religious sermon, and a good read. The religious musings recall some of those in Agnes Grey, but Wildfell Hall is a quantum leap past that book (though I expect each has its die-hard partisans), less self-righteous, less tunnel vision. Still, it's a Victorian novel with its long discourses, rambling plot, and minute examination of the world before it, but the you-are-there descriptions of drunken parties and marital cruelty takes the reader past the expected. My favorite part of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, though, is that a woman, Mrs. Graham, is the Heathcliff or Rochester character. She is mysterious, uncompromising, serious, demanding, harsh, even unreasonable, and yet the object of desire. She is Anne Bronte's indelible creation. Although sometimes too good to be true (but consistent with the character), at other times she does not seem good at all. That's the cream in the coffee of this book. There are weaknesses. The early chapters written as letters from a man to his friend didn't ring true, these were not the letters of a man who would savagely beat a friend; they just didn't ring true -- the book really hit its stride when the narration switched to the pages from a woman's diary. From that point on it was hard to stop reading. Most of the men in the book are clods or cads, even the supposedly sensitive, loving ones. But these minor points didn't detract much from the story. This book makes clear that if not exactly their equal, Anne Bronte deserves to be seen as a full partner in the Bronte sisters. [3½★]