I Read a Book: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë
Among other things, an early influence on "Don't Come Home A-Drinkin' (With Lovin' On Your Mind"
I somehow got an English degree all those years ago without ever acquainting myself with any novels by the Brontë sisters. I’ve since read Wuthering Heights a couple times, but still haven’t even gotten around to Jane Eyre. I have now, however, discovered the earnest delights of the second and final novel by the youngest of the sisters.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a romance novel, but a rather spectacularly radical one for the year 1848. Helen, the titular tenant, wins the first man she desires, but the bulk of the book shows us all the reasons that was a bad idea. For her husband, Arthur Huntingdon, is a drunken lout, a philanderer, and a bit of a brute as well.
Ah, but that’s getting ahead of the story. Brontë structures this novel in three parts. The first quarter or so of the book is narrated by one Gilbert Markham in the ever-so-19th-Century epistolary style. He’s writing from the perspective of twenty years later, telling his best friend of the times he had when he was a bachelor and fell in love with a mysterious widow woman who has come to live in the long abandoned Wildfell Hall. (Oh, did I just give something away?) Conveniently, each of these letters is a chapter, and Markham does nothing to give away any surprises that come along as we go.
Then, the chapters become literal transcriptions of Helen’s diary of the years before she got there, when she was single and learning what she wanted out of life, and somehow wound up marrying the guy her aunt warned her about. (The diary, see, was given to Markham as an easier explanation to him of her current position than maybe just telling him the high points in a few sentences. Hey, that’s the way literature used to work, and I’m delighted it did.)
The final 15% of the book brings us back up to the time when Markham got the diary, and then there are a whole lot of romance movie tropes from back in the days before they were all cliché. The ending isn’t a big surprise, though there are a few places where I thought maybe things would go differently. Along the way, Helen’s brother (Markham’s friend except for the times when he’s mad at him for different reasons) shares letters she writes to keep us informed on her doings when she’s not in town anymore.
I should say a word about the glorious language Anne Brontë commanded for this book. She pulls plenty of images from the King James Bible, of course. She has a nicely subtle way of making the voices of her two narrarators different – I can’t quite put my finger on it, but Markham’s tales are giddier, more full of emotional outcries, while Helen’s are more suppressed, smaller, hidden, restrained. Also, there are some religious discussions which I found hilarious, particularly the parts wherein two potential lovers are arguing over whether or not they should wait until they can be united in Heaven, but one of them insists it won’t be any good if he has to love everybody else the same. I don’t think this was meant to be funny, but it sure made me laugh.
A book in the middle of the 19th Century that featured a woman standing up to the miseries created by her husband was naturally controversial. Even given that it was released under a male pen name, it didn’t make a big splash in the marketplace, and it’s feminist themes kept it from being a particularly famous novel. As it was, Anne Brontë passed away from tuberculosis less than a year after her sister Emily had done the same.