THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL (Chiltern Classics) by Anne Bronte

DESCRIPTION

A new, beautifully laid-out edition of Anne Brontë‘s second and last novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, originally published in 1848. The Tenant of Wildfell Hallis an epistolary novel, framed as a series of letter from Gilbert Markham to his friend about the events connected with his meeting a mysterious young widow who arrives as a tenant at Wildfell Hall, a long vacant Elizabethan mansion. A social outcast due to her seclusion and eccentricities, Gilbert nevertheless befriends her and learns her life story, including the story of her former husband’s physical and moral decline through alcohol and debauchery, leading to her fleeing to Wildfell Hall. This depiction of marital strife and a woman asserting her own independence to protect herself and her son from an abusive husband was shocking at the time and caused a literary sensation, leading many critics to consider The Tenant of Wildfell Hall to be one of the first truly feminist novels.

Anne Brontë (1820 – 1849) was an English novelist and poet, the youngest of the famed Brontë sisters whose novels are considered to be classics of English literature. Born into the Brontë family, Anne was the youngest of the four sibling who reached adulthood and first reached literary prominence publishing a collection of poetry alongside the other Brontë Sisters using the pseudonym Acton Bell in 1846. Anne’s first novel, Agnes Grey, was published in 1847 alongside her sister’s novel Wuthering Heights. Her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, was published in 1848. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is thought to be one of the first feminist novels and among the greatest – and most underrated and overlooked – novels of the 19th century. Anne died at age 29, likely of tuberculosis, cutting short an incredibly promising career that some scholars suspect, given the glints of burgeoning genius in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, might have eventually surpassed her more famous sisters.