The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Summary: Anne Brontë's Scandalous Second Novel
What it is about
Anne Brontë's second and final novel was published in 1848 under the pen name Acton Bell. It opens with a farmer, Gilbert Markham, writing a long letter to his friend Jack Halford. In it he recalls the arrival of a mysterious young widow, Mrs Helen Graham, at Wildfell Hall, an Elizabethan mansion that has stood empty for years. She comes with her small son, Arthur, and a single servant. She keeps to herself. She paints, and she sells her pictures for money, which was not what respectable women of the early nineteenth century were expected to do.
The village cannot leave her alone. Her seclusion breeds gossip, the gossip hardens into scandal, and she becomes an outcast. Gilbert, who has been casually courting the vicar's daughter Eliza Millward, finds his attention shifting to the newcomer. Eliza retaliates by spreading rumours about her, and may well have invented them. Gilbert is led to believe that his friend Frederick Lawrence is courting Mrs Graham. At a chance meeting on a road he strikes Lawrence with a whip handle and knocks him from his horse.
When Gilbert accuses Helen of loving Lawrence, she hands him her diaries. The middle and longest part of the book is what he reads there: the record of her marriage, told in her own words. It is the reason the novel caused such offence in 1848. Brontë does not soften the picture of a bad marriage, and she lets her heroine do something the law of the day did not permit.
The main characters
Helen Graham is the centre of the book. Young, devout, a working artist by necessity and by choice, she is reserved in public because she has every reason to be. Her diaries show a woman who married for love and then had to build a plan of escape.
Gilbert Markham narrates the outer frame. He is a gentleman farmer, proud, hot-tempered and prone to jumping to conclusions, as the business with the whip handle shows. He is not a flawless hero, and the book is honest about that.
Arthur Huntingdon is Helen's husband. Handsome and witty, he is also spoilt, selfish and self-indulgent. Before the marriage he flirts with Annabella Wilmot in order to manipulate Helen into accepting him. Afterwards he fills the family home, Grassdale, with a pack of dissolute friends and their drunken revels. He grows jealous of his own son for taking his wife's attention.
Around them: Frederick Lawrence, Helen's brother; Rachel, the loyal servant; Walter Hargrave, an unwelcome admirer who senses an opening and presses it; his sister Milicent, Helen's friend; Annabella, who becomes Lady Lowborough and is unfaithful to her melancholy but devoted husband; and young Arthur, the child at the heart of Helen's decision.
The themes
Marriage and the law sit at the core. Helen's flight breaks social convention, but it also breaks the law as it then stood, because a wife had no claim on her child and no easy route out. Brontë knew this and wrote it anyway.
Work is the second great theme. Helen paints for a living. Her easel and brushes are the only means she has of supporting herself and her son, which is why her husband burns them when he discovers her plan. The novel takes a woman's professional earnings seriously in a way few books of the period did.
Then there is the question of reform. Helen marries believing that gentle persuasion and a good example will mend a dissolute man. The book tests that belief hard. Running alongside it is Anne Brontë's own religious conviction in universal salvation, which shapes the treatment of even the worst characters.
Class and gossip run through everything. A woman alone in a large house, with money of her own and no explanation, is a scandal in waiting. Gilbert's own anxieties about rank surface late in the story.
How it ends
Skip this paragraph if you want the novel fresh. After reading the diaries, Gilbert is sent away because Helen is not free to marry. She returns to Grassdale when Huntingdon falls gravely ill. Her nursing fails. His death is painful and terrified, and he refuses to accept responsibility for his life, wanting Helen to come with him and plead on his behalf. A year later, Gilbert chases a rumour of her remarriage and finds that it is Lawrence who is marrying, to Esther Hargrave. Gilbert learns the Grassdale wealth was Helen's all along, since Huntingdon was penniless, and that she now lives at her estate at Staningley. He goes there fearing she is far above him. They meet by chance, reconcile and marry.
Why it still matters
It was an instant success in 1848 and probably the most shocking novel any of the Brontës produced. After Anne's death, Charlotte blocked its republication in England until 1854, which kept it out of sight for years. Most critics now count it among the first feminist novels, chiefly for its frank account of marital strife and its insistence that a woman might work, leave and survive. It suits readers who want the Brontë world without romance softening the edges.
