The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
**Librarian note: Alternate cover editions for this ISBN are: "Woman in white dress" (with the title on white and black background), "Woman at the easel" on a black and blue background, and "Furniture, easel and window".** ***Anne Brontë's second novel is a passionate and courageous challenge to the conventions supposedly upheld by Victorian society and reflected in circulating-library fiction.*** The heroine, Helen Huntingdon, after a short period of initial happiness, leaves her dissolute husband, and must earn her own living to rescue her son from his influence. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is compelling in its imaginative power, the realism and range of its dialogue, and its psychological insight into the characters involved in a marital battle. While I acknowledge the success of the present work to have been greater than I anticipated, and the praises it has elicited from a few kind critics to have been greater than it deserved, I must also admit that from some other quarters it has been censured with an asperity which I was as little prepared to expect, and which my judgment, as well as my feelings, assures me is more bitter than just. It is scarcely the province of a
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Young widow Helen Graham arrives at the half-ruined Wildfell Hall on the Yorkshire moors with a small son named Arthur and no story about her past. Gentleman farmer Gilbert Markham falls for her in spite of village gossip, until she gives him her diary and he reads how she got there.
Yes. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was published in 1848 and is in the public domain. Free editions are available legally through Project Gutenberg.
Yes. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is widely cited as one of the first feminist novels in English literature. Its frank depiction of an alcoholic husband and a woman who leaves him was so scandalous in 1848 that Charlotte Bronte tried to prevent its republication.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was written by Anne Brontë, published in 1847 by CRW.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is 432 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall takes most readers 6 to 9 hours to finish.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a standalone novel by Anne Brontë, not part of a series.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.