The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

This rose is not so fragrant as a summer flower, but it has stood through hardships none of them could bear: the cold rain of winter has sufficed to nourish it, and its faint sun to warm it; the bleak winds have not blanched it, or broken its stem, and the keen frost has not blighted it. Look, Gilbert, it is still fresh and blooming as a flower can be, with the cold snow even now on its petals. – Will you have it?

What must it have been like in the shadow of her older sisters' successes, Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Emily's Wuthering Heights, when the timid and frail Anne Brontë conceived of and published her proto-feminist book of ideas, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall? With its exposé of the drunken debauches and false morality of Britain's upper classes, Tenant was reproached by critics in its day as “coarse” and “not fit for girls”; compelling Anne (under her masculine nom de plume, Acton Bell) to add the following rejoinder in her preface to the book's second edition: “I wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it.” Apparently based on both her own experiences as a governess in the homes of “her betters” and what she witnessed of her brother Branwell's descent into alcoholism and depravity, perhaps this truth was too close to home and that is what prompted Charlotte to disallow any further publication of Tenant after Anne's too early death at twenty-nine years old. Unlike Charlotte and Emily's Gothic and Romantic love-of-a-good-woman-tames-the-brute tales, Anne's realistic portrayal of an abusive marriage (and a trapped wife's limited options) stands out as earthshaking. In 1913, critic May Sinclair wrote “that the slamming of Helen's bedroom door against her husband reverberated throughout Victorian England”, and that sounds like a necessary and overdue reverberation. So different from Charlotte and Emily's better known works, I just may have enjoyed Tenant the best of the lot.

“You know it was reported a month ago, that somebody was going to take Wildfell Hall – and – what do you think? It has actually been inhabited above a week! – and we never knew!”

“Impossible!” cried my mother.

“Preposterous!!!” shrieked Fergus.

“It has indeed! – and by a single lady!”

“Good gracious, my dear! The place is in ruins!”

I very much enjoyed this book's framing device: as it opens, a Gilbert Markham is writing to his brother-in-law, Halford, and promises to provide a “full and faithful account of certain circumstances connected with the most important event of my life.” Gilbert then describes his meeting with the titular tenant – a young widow who has relocated to the country, where she intends to make her living as a landscape artist to support herself and her five-year-old son – and just as Gilbert falls in love with this Helen Graham, some vicious gossip turns him against her. In order to restore her reputation – at least in Gilbert's eyes – Helen gives him her diary (that recounts her entire marriage), and after faithfully transcribing the entire thing (which takes up more than half the book) in his letters to Halford, Gilbert then resumes the story from his own point-of-view. I really liked the opportunity that this device allowed for the perspective to shift from a male's to a female's (and back again), and the intimate forms allowed naturally for personal thoughts to be revealed. On the other hand, I didn't quite believe that in either a letter or a diary would there be so much minute detail (including long stretches of verbatim dialogue), but I do understand that the novel form was evolving at the time and this was a common, if imperfect, tool. By far, I preferred the diary portion, which begins with young Helen at eighteen, newly introduced to London society by the aunt and uncle who raised her, and cautioned against choosing a husband unwisely:

Keep a guard over your eyes and ears as the inlets of your heart, and over your lips as the outlet, lest they betray you in a moment of unwariness. Receive, coldly and dispassionately, every attention, till you have ascertained and duly considered the worth of the aspirant; and let your affections be consequent upon approbation alone. First study; then approve; then love. Let your eyes be blind to all external attractions, your ears deaf to all the fascinations of flattery and light discourse. – These are nothing – and worse than nothing – snares and wiles of the tempter, to lure the thoughtless to their own destruction. Principle is the first thing, after all; and next to that, good sense, respectability, and moderate wealth. If you should marry the handsomest, and most accomplished and superficially agreeable man in the world, you little know the misery that would overwhelm you if, after all, you should find him to be a worthless reprobate, or even an impracticable fool.

Helen – a pious and intelligent young woman – doesn't believe herself to be susceptible to flatterers, and while she understandably resists a match with the boring but wealthy older men her guardians propose for her, her heart is indeed captured by the first curly-haired, twinkle-eyed young charmer who squeezes her hand and whispers low in her ear. Believing that her own good example is all that the notorious fratboy Arthur needs to improve himself, Helen waves off all advice and enters into a hasty marriage; free to repent at leisure. Anne Brontë does a wonderful job of exposing the interiority of a young girl's heart (even having Helen give Arthur the cold shoulder and expecting him to figure out what's wrong on his own), and as Arthur's behaviour goes from bad (disappearing for months at a time to party in London) to worse (inviting his drunken companions [and their corruptible wives] to party at his house and disrespect his spouse), Anne makes it clear that British law and society provided Helen with no remedy. Helen does find some relief and reciprocated love with her newborn son, but while at first her husband is peevishly jealous of the boy, he eventually learns to hurt his wife by getting the toddler drunk and teaching him to curse his mother with words he barely understands. While Helen knew that God and man expected her to stay in her abusive home, it was for the moral salvation of her son that she decided to steal away in the dead of night and take up her mysterious residence at Wildfell Hall. Yet, when Gilbert comes a-courting, she is neither free to accept his attentions nor willing to reveal her past – until the gossipmongers attempt her ruination.

The village is all alive about it; and I saw two people that had seen others that had seen the man that found him. That sounds far-fetched; but it isn’t so when you think of it.

I loved everything about the rural community of Linden-Car: the small town gossip, the social strivers, the pompous vicar who detests tea and loves ale and won't hear a word against the salubrious effects of alcohol (so richly ironic in a book that has a drunken Lord falling down insensate and an intoxicated husband trying to goad his uncomplaining wife to tears by shaking her by the shoulders). While finding good matches for the daughters is a constant concern for the meddlesome mammas, Gilbert himself (although self-assuredly destined for “higher aims”) is forced to assume management of the family farm upon the death of his father; everyone has their place, and although a particularly beautiful woman might exchange her fortune for a title, or a plain girl might be lucky to snare a bullying drunkard, Anne Brontë isn't afraid to have some of her characters age bitter and alone as they wait in vain for a proper match. And while Charlotte and Emily might have believed that the love of a good woman could tame their Rochesters and Heathcliffs, Anne didn't believe that even the perfectly moral example of Helen could redeem an unrepentant sinner such as her husband Arthur. (In an interesting aside, Helen believes in the doctrine of Universalism – that Hell is a time-limited purification step, not an eternity of punishment – and as this was against the teachings of the Anglican Church, this detail led to further criticism; even from Anne's own family.)

Not only did I appreciate the ideas in this book, but I was honestly intrigued; wanting to know how Helen got from there to here and what became of Arthur and what would happen next. I'm delighted to have finally read this classic and once again regret that the Brontës (as unfair as it is to treat the sisters as one entity; particularly as this book proves) all died so young and left so little behind.