'He looked up wistfully in my face, and gravely asked - "Mamma, why are you so wicked?"' The mysterious new tenant of Wildfell Hall has a dark secret. But as the captivated Gilbert Markham will discover, it is not the story circulating among local gossips. Living under an assumed name, 'Helen Graham' is the estranged wife of a dissolute rake, desperate to protect her son from his destructive influence. Her diary entries reveal the shocking world of debauchery and cruelty from which she has fled. Combining a sensational story of a man's physical and moral decline through alcohol, a study of marital breakdown, a disquisition on the care and upbringing of children, and a hard-hitting critique of the position of women in Victorian society, this passionate tale of betrayal is set within a stern moral framework tempered by Anne Brontë's optimistic belief in universal redemption. Drawing on her first-hand experiences with her brother Branwell, Brontë's novel scandalized contemporary readers. It still retains its power to shock. Anne Brontë was a British novelist and poet and the youngest member of the Brontë literary family. Her older sisters were Charlotte (Jane Eyre) and Emily (Wuthering Heights). Anne's novels are completely different from the romantic novels by her sisters. She wrote in a realistic style. Her novels, like her sisters' novels, have become English literature classics.
If you haven't already read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, you can do so online for free at Read Print.
Here's the beginning:
You must go back with me to the autumn of 1827.
My father, as you know, was a sort of gentleman farmer in -shire; and I, by his express desire, succeeded him in the same quiet occupation, not very willingly, for ambition urged me to higher aims, and self-conceit assured me that, in disregarding its voice, I was burying my talent in the earth, and hiding my light under a bushel. My mother had done her utmost to persuade me that I was capable of great achievements; but my father, who thought ambition was the surest road to ruin, and change but another word for destruction, would listen to no scheme for bettering either my own condition, or that of my fellow mortals. He assured me it was all rubbish, and exhorted me, with his dying breath, to continue in the good old way, to follow his steps, and those of his father before him, and let my highest ambition be to walk honestly through the world, looking neither to the right hand nor to the left, and to transmit the paternal acres to my children in, at least, as flourishing a condition as he left them to me.
Which Brontë sister novels have you read?
I've read Jane Eyre by Charlotte and Wuthering Heights by Emily. I need to even it out and read one of Anne's novels (her other novel is Agnes Grey).
