Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë

Originally published: 1848
Acquired: December 2009
Read: November 2025

As a Victorianist, I was of course made to read a lot of Brontë novels in undergrad and grad school, either in coursework or beyond: Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, The Professor, Villette. But they were all by Emily or Charlotte... never Anne! I did once pick up a copy of Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall but of course it has taken me over fifteen years to get around to reading it.

I was familiar with Kate Beaton's "Dude Watchin' with the Brontës," which tells us that marrying alcoholic brooding men with no emotional intelligence was a thing that Emily and Charlotte were into, but not Anne, and indeed, that's basically the thesis of Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Our protagonist is a gentleman farmer who gets a new neighbor, a woman with a daughter; he's attracted to her but she's mysterious. Eventually she tells him the story of her first marriage, which was quite terrible. It's easy to read this as what it really might be like to be married to, say, Heathcliff. Then everything works out. It's definitely more pious than the works of Charlotte or Emily, and I don't know that it was more to my actual taste than Jane Eyre, which probably beats it for character complexity. But it, despite being a bit on the slow side, certainly wasn't as boring as The Professor or Villette.

So I am glad I finally read it, and I intend to seek out Anne's other novel now, but I doubt I will ever become a superfan of any of the Brontës, as influential as they all are.