The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Penguin Classics) [Unabridged] [Paperback]

Anne Brontė (Author), Stevie Davies (Editor, Contributor)

Book Description

Series: Penguin Classics | Publication Date: June 1, 1996

Gilbert Markham is deeply intrigued by Helen Graham, a beautiful and secretive young woman who has moved into nearby Wildfell Hall with her young son. He is quick to offer Helen his friendship, but when her reclusive behavior becomes the subject of local gossip and speculation, Gilbert begins to wonder whether his trust in her has been misplaced. It is only when she allows Gilbert to read her diary that the truth is revealed and the shocking details of the disastrous marriage she has left behind emerge...Told with great immediacy, combined with wit and irony, "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" is a powerfully involving read.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Of the three Bronte sisters, Emily and Charlotte are better known, yet it is Anne's work which carries some of the strongest feminist themes. In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall a devout young woman named Helen falls in love with a man who is handsome, but whose values are questionable; willing to believe she can alter his character, she marries him. Her marriage becomes a misery she has no power to change until she devises a bold plan to take control. Her story comes through two voices - her own and that of Gilbert Markham, a man who falls in love with Helen later in her life - and is told through journals and letters written over a period of time. Because of the privacy and immediacy of these narratives, the reader sees personal changes and attitudes Helen and Gilbert are often unaware of at the time: we witness Helen's first naive protestations of passion for her husband and follow her through her eventual disillusionment; we recognize Gilbert's early, unconscious egotism. While the plot continues and mysteries are unraveled, what Helen and Gilbert say - as well as what they don't say - provides another story to follow, which reinforces Anne Bronte's indictment of the sexual double standards of nineteenth-century Britain. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Erica Bauermeister

From the Inside Flap

Over a short period in the 1840s, the three Brontë sisters working in a remote English
parsonage produced some of the best-loved and most-enduring of all novels: Charlotte's Jane Eyre, Emily's Wuthering Heights, and Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a book that created a scandal when it was published in 1848 under the pseudonym Acton Bell.
     Compelling in its imaginative power and bold naturalism, the novel opens in the autumn of 1827, when a mysterious woman who calls herself Helen Graham seeks refuge at the desolate moorland mansion of Wildfell Hall. Brontë's enigmatic heroine becomes the object of gossip and jealousy as neighbors learn she is escaping from an abusive marriage and living under an assumed name. A daring story that exposed the dark brutality of Victorian chauvinism, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was nevertheless attacked by some critics as a celebration of the same excesses it criticized.
     "Every reader who has felt the power of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights comes, sooner or later, to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall," observed Brontë scholar Margaret Lane. "Anne Brontë, with all the Brontë taste for violence and drama, and with her experience of the same rude scenes and savage Yorkshire tales that had fed the imaginations of her sisters, did not shrink. She used the material at hand, and shaped it with singular honesty and seri-
ousness....Anne is a true Brontë."
     This edition of The Tenant of Wildfell
Hall is the companion volume to the Mobil Masterpiece Theatre WGBH television presentation broadcast on PBS.

The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foun-dation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hard-bound editions of important works of liter-ature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inau-gurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices.



The Modern Library of the World's
Best Books

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a dramatic serial on Mobil Masterpiece Theatre, a public television series presented by WGBH-TV, Boston, made possible by a grant from the Mobil Corporation.

                                                            
"The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was conceived in the same atmosphere as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Wildfell Hall has power and imagination, and is so close to one of the tragedies in the sisters' own lives, that no perceptive reader can be indifferent to it."

                                                          --Margaret Lane
"I wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it."

                                                             --Anne Bronte --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 576 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Classics (June 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140434747
• ISBN-13: 978-0140434743
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (66 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #563,708 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Exceptionally Powerful & Disturbing Novel!, May 12, 2005

By 

Jana L. Perskie "ceruleana" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Oxford World's Classics) (Paperback)

Young Helen Lawrence had just come out into society, and unfortunately two of her beaus, older men who, although settled, of good character and wealthy, didn't meet her romantic standards. I can't say that I blame the talented, attractive young woman. I was not particularly turned-on by either of the men, myself. Middle-aged, stodgy and tiresome, they were not the answer to an eighteen year-old's dreams - even a practical eighteen year-old. A third suitor, Arthur Huntington, handsome, charismatic, and known by some to be "destitute of principle and prone to vice," was obviously smitten by Helen, and she was drawn to him also. Her aunt emphasized that the young woman should, above all, look for character in a potential mate. She advised her niece to seek a man of principle, good sense, respectability and moderate wealth. She warned Helen away from Huntington, calling him a reprobate. Helen agreed that she should marry such a one whose character her aunt would approve of, but also argued that love should play a part in her selection. Meanwhile, Huntington, on his best behavior, continued to woo Helen until she finally accepted his proposal, on the condition of her relatives' approval. Helen knew that Arthur was somewhat deficient in sense, scruples and conduct. However, she also truly believed that with her own strong religious convictions and love, she could and would change him for the good. In spite of numerous examples of her beloved's past lechery and excesses, Helen insisted on the match. And so they married.

Within a few months Helen became much more familiar with her husband's character. He had no hobbies nor interests, as she did. She is a gifted painter, loves to read, enjoys the outdoors, and is not easily bored. Arthur demanded all Helen's time and attention, to entertain and pamper him. When he could no longer bear the country solitude, he left for London, to reacquaint himself with his old haunts and bachelor friends. He insisted his wife remain behind, at their estate, Grassdale Manor. Huntington's behavior worsened with time, even after Helen bore him a beautiful son. He brought his debauched friends into his home for months on end, hosting wild drinking orgies and participating in a variety of low behavior extremely insulting to his wife, indeed, even encouraging his friends to mock his spouse. Helen eventually discovered that one of the houseguests, the wife of a friend, was Arthur's longtime mistress. Thus a double adultery was being conducted at Grassdale Manor, while she and her son were in residence, along with excesses of every kind.

It was at this point that Helen, contrary to the customs of her times, locked her bedroom door against her husband. This seems like logical behavior in the 21st century. And many might ask why she did not leave Huntington long before. In the Victorian Age, the law and society defined a married woman as a husband's property. Women were totally dependant upon their mates, and husbands could actually have their wives locked away in asylums at their whim and convenience. There is a scene in the novel where Arthur has all Helen's paints and canvasses destroyed, and takes possession of her jewelry and money, so she cannot leave him. When the profligate begins to manipulate his young son, encouraging the child to drink and curse his mother, Helen does run away with her child.

As the novel opens, we find her living in a few rooms at the remote Wildfell Hall, under the assumed identity of Helen Graham, a widow. Here she earns her living by painting. The neighbors are curious and seek her out, one in particular, Gilbert Markham. However when Helen is not forthcoming about her past, she becomes the object of ugly gossip and jealousy. Much of this compelling story is narrated through a series of letters Markham writes to a friend, and through Helen's own diary entries.

The novel is divided into three sections: Helen's life at Wildfell Hall and her friendship with Gilbert Markham; Helen's diary describing the Huntington marriage; and the events following Markham's reading the diary. Anne Bronte's novel is powerful, haunting and quite disturbing. Miss Bronte, and her brother Branwell, served as governess and tutor to the children of wealthy aristocrats. Some of the behavior described here is apparently taken from events which Anne witnessed, and which marked Branwell severely. Ms. Bronte openly stated that in "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" she, "wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it." This well written, extraordinary tale can most definitely hold its own against the works of Anne's more famous sisters, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, and those of other noted authors of the period.
JANA

50 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Forgotten Sister, April 26, 2000

By 

JLind555 - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

Anne is the Bronte we never read in school and most of us don't read afterwards, which is a big loss for those who don't, because she's at least as talented as her two older sisters. "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" can hold its own against "Jane Eyre" or "Wuthering Heights" any day in the week, but it was panned in its own time, in large part because of its "unladylike" topic of alcoholism. Anne Bronte knew alcoholism first hand through her brother Bramwell who drank himself to death, and her revulsion of the alcoholic personality is central to this book. The heroine of "Tenant", Helen Graham, is a headstrong and independent young woman, who marries Arthur Huntington against the advice of her family. She is one of those who loves not wisely but too well, because Arthur, a selfish and irresponsible womanizer, cares about nothing but satisfying his own wishes and desires. Helen wants to help Arthur turn his life around, which Arthur couldn't care less about, and his drinking and adultery right under her nose eventually repels her to the point where she despises him as much as she once loved him. It is only when she sees him attempting to influence her young son to become a chip off the old block, that she realizes her responsibility as a mother to save her son from his father trumps her duty as a wife to stand by her husband. With the help of her brother, she runs away with her son to the anonymity of life in a small village. Here she meets Gilbert Markham, who falls in love with her, but realizes that their relationship has no future as long as her husband is alive. Arthur's ultimate death from alcoholism not only frees Helen from an abusive and degrading marriage, it also leaves her free to find happiness with Gilbert. Anne Bronte pulled no punches in writing this book and that is probably what so perturbed readers of her own era; too bad for them, because they were unable to appreciate this book for what it is, one of the unrecognized classics of English literature.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 'The Tenant of Wildfell Hall' - a review, January 15, 2001

By 

Paul O'Connor (Liverpool, UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

'Sick of mankind and its disgusting ways' Anne Bronte once scribbled on the back of her prayer book. Her evident harsh view of life, coupled with her moral strength as a woman, are beautifully interwoven to produce this novel; her masterpiece. Although never enjoying the popularity and success of 'Jane Eyre' and 'Wuthering Heights' - her sisters' books - 'Wildfell Hall' is quite fit to join any bookshelf of classic English literature. The themes include utter despair and the tragic consequences of a young woman's naivety; Helen felt that, although she could see Arthur's faults, she would be able to somehow change him once they were married. In reality, her marital experience was a disaster.

Anne Bronte creates a world in which the drunken, immoral behaviour of men becomes the norm and this may have been startling to contemporary readers - perhaps a reason for the book's panning at the critics. The narrative is built up delicately; first Gilbert; and then the racier, more gripping diary of Helen as she guides us through her married life; before returning again to Gilbert, whose tale by this time has become far more exciting as we know of Helen's past. Helen's realisation of the awful truth and her desperate attempts to escape her husband, are forever imprinted in the mind of the reader as passages of perfect prose.

One of the earliest feminist novels, the underrated Anne Bronte writes in this a classic, and - defying the views of her early (male) critics - a claim to the position of one of England's finest ever female writers.