Helen and her family

Annabella Milbanke, a possible real-life inspiration for Helen Graham

• Helen "Nell" Lawrence Huntingdon, known also under her alias Helen Graham (Graham is her mother's maiden name), the protagonist of the novel and the tenant of the title. Wildfell Hall is the place where she and her brother were born. After their mother's death she goes to live with their aunt and uncle at Staningley Manor, while her brother, Frederick, remains with their father. In spite of their separation, Helen has maintained an affectionate relationship with her brother and later he helps her to escape from her abusive and dissolute husband. The character of Helen Graham was probably inspired by Anna Isabella Milbanke, the wife of Lord Byron. Like Anna, Helen firstly believed that reforming her husband's behaviour was her religious obligation. Despite disillusionment, both women retained their Universalist faith.^[5]
• Master Arthur Huntingdon, five years old at the beginning of the book, the son of Arthur Huntingdon and Helen. He has a resemblance to his uncle, Frederick, which gives rise to gossip. He is grown up by the time of Gilbert's letter to Jack Halford, and is residing at Grassdale Manor with his wife, Helen Hattersley (the daughter of Milicent Hargrave and Ralph Hattersley).
• Mr Maxwell, Helen's wealthy uncle, dies near the end of the novel and leaves Staningley to Helen.
• Margaret "Peggy" Maxwell, Helen's aunt, tries to warn her against marrying Huntingdon. She dies several years after Helen's and Gilbert's marriage.
• Frederick Lawrence, Helen's brother, helps her to escape from Huntingdon and lends her money. As he and Helen grew up apart and only met in Staningley or Grassdale, no one in Linden-Car village guessed that the secretive Mrs Graham is actually Frederick's sister. Eventually he marries Esther Hargrave. Being in mourning for her husband, Helen is forced to miss her brother's wedding.

Huntingdon and his circle

• Arthur Huntingdon, Helen's abusive and alcoholic husband, is a Byronic figure of great fascination but also of barely concealed moral failings.^[6] His abusive behaviour impels Helen to run away from him, but nevertheless when he becomes ill (after the injury from falling from a horse when drunk), Helen returns to Grassdale to take care of him. Unwilling to stop drinking alcohol, Huntingdon deteriorates in health and eventually dies. He is widely thought to be loosely based on the author's brother, Branwell,^[7] but some critics have argued that they have very little in common. Along with Lord Lowborough, Huntingdon bears far stronger resemblance to two types of drunkards outlined in Robert Macnish's The Anatomy of Drunkenness.^[3]
• Annabella Wilmot, later Lady Lowborough, Arthur Huntingdon's paramour, is flirtatious, bold and exquisitely beautiful. She has an affair with Arthur Huntingdon for several years. Helen is forced to put up with the affair, but when Annabella's husband discovers it, he obtains a divorce. Gilbert says he hears that after Annabella moves to the continent, she falls into poverty and dies destitute and alone, but stresses he cannot be sure if this is true or merely a rumour.
• Lord Lowborough, a friend of Huntingdon's and Annabella's husband, is apathetic but devoted. Melancholic, dour and gloomy, he is in complete contrast to Huntingdon. He used to gamble and drink too much alcohol and developed an addiction to opium, but, after his financial ruin, gradually reforms himself. Lowborough truly loves Annabella, and her infidelity brings him such suffering that only his Christian faith and strong will keep him from suicide. Later he divorces her and after some time marries a plain middle-aged woman, who makes a good wife to him and a stepmother to his children with Annabella – a son and a nominal daughter. Lord Lowborough also has some resemblances to Branwell, such as a life of debauchery, periods of remorse/religious torments, and opium, as well as moral weakness.^[3]
• Ralph Hattersley, a friend of Huntingdon's, marries Milicent because he wants a quiet wife who will let him do what he likes with no word of reproach or complaint. He mistreats his wife. "I sometimes think she has no feeling at all; and then I go on until she cries – and that satisfies me," he tells Helen. But after he reforms himself he becomes a loving husband and father.
• Mr Grimsby, another of Arthur's friends, is a misogynist. He helps Arthur to conceal his affair with Annabella.

Inhabitants of Linden-Car Farm

• Gilbert Markham, a twenty-four-year-old farmer, is the principal narrator in the novel. He exhibits jealousy, moodiness, and anger, but during the course of the novel he grows morally and proves to be worthy of Helen.
• Fergus Markham, Gilbert's seventeen-year-old brother, is high-spirited and idle, and often tries but fails to be witty.
• Rose Markham, a clever and pretty girl of 19, is Gilbert's younger sister and a friend of the Millward sisters. She becomes the wife of Jack Halford, to whom Gilbert is recounting in letters what happened 20 years prior in his youth.
• Mrs Markham, Gilbert's mother, is a great admirer of the Reverend Millward and his ideas.

Inhabitants of Ryecote Farm

• Jane Wilson, a friend of Eliza Millward and a scandalmonger, tries to ensnare Frederick Lawrence, but when Gilbert reveals to him her hatred of Frederick's sister Helen, Frederick breaks off their relationship. As no man she meets fits her high standards, she moves to a nearby country town, constantly name dropping, but friendless and, according to Helen, becomes a bitter spinster.
• Richard Wilson, Jane's brother, succeeds the Reverend Millward in the vicarage of Lindenhope and eventually marries his daughter, the plain Mary.
• Robert Wilson, brother to Jane and Richard, is a rough farmer whom Jane is ashamed of. However, everyone else approves of him as being pleasant and kind. He eventually marries, and Jane leaves the family home as she cannot stand him and his ordinary wife.
• Mrs Wilson, the mother of Jane, Richard and Robert, is a gossip like her daughter.

Inhabitants of the Vicarage

• Eliza Millward, daughter of the vicar and friend of Jane Wilson, is a scandalmonger. Gilbert carries on a half-serious flirtation with her before he first meets Helen.
• Mary Millward, Eliza's elder sister, is a plain, quiet, sensible girl, housekeeper and family drudge. She is trusted and valued by her father, loved and courted by children and poor people, dogs and cats, and slighted and neglected by everybody else.
• The Reverend Michael Millward, Eliza's and Mary's father, is a man of fixed principles, strong prejudices and regular habits. He considers anyone who disagrees with his views deplorably ignorant.

Inhabitants of The Grove

• Walter Hargrave, a friend of Arthur Huntingdon's, is a predatory admirer of Helen while she is still living with her husband. He is a cousin of Annabella Wilmot.
• Milicent Hargrave, a meek woman married to Ralph Hattersley against her will, is Walter's sister and Helen's close friend. Milicent can be seen as a foil to her.^[8] While Helen is spirited and forthright, unafraid to speak to the men in her life with frankness, Milicent, in contrast, is trampled and ignored by her husband. Helen eventually leaves Arthur with her beloved son in tow, while Milicent says that she is "really contented" with her husband and "would not exchange [him] for any man on earth". At length, Ralph finally reforms himself and Milicent finds happiness in marriage.
• Esther Hargrave, the younger sister of Milicent and Walter, and Helen's friend, is bold, high-spirited and independent. She resists an arranged marriage her family tries to force her into and eventually marries Helen's brother, Frederick Lawrence.
• Mrs Hargrave, mother of the three Hargrave children, is a hard and stingy woman. She adores her only son and tries to marry off her daughters as soon as possible.

Other characters

• Mr Boarham, one of Helen's suitors before her marriage, is rejected because Helen is repelled by his dull conversation. Helen prefers to spell his name "Bore'em".
• Mr Wilmot, the uncle of Annabella Wilmot, is another of Helen's early suitors. She considers him a scoundrel.
• Rachel, a servant and friend of Helen and her son, has taken care of Helen since her birth.
• Alice Myers, another paramour of the elder Huntingdon, is hired ostensibly as a governess for little Arthur. Helen is suspicious of her from the start (all the families she has previously worked for have conveniently gone abroad), and when Rachel gives her certain proof that Alice is having an affair with her husband, she decides to flee.
• Benson, the butler at Grassdale Manor, has compassion for Helen in her misfortune and helps her escape.
• Jack Halford, a squire, is the husband of Rose Markham and the addressee of Gilbert's letters. He is an unseen character.

Themes

Alcoholism

The Drunkard's Progress, lithograph by Nathaniel Currier supporting the temperance movement

Arthur Huntingdon and most of his male friends are heavy drinkers. Lord Lowborough is "the drunkard by necessity" – he tries to use alcohol as a way to cope with his personal problems. Arthur, like his friend Ralph Hattersley, is the "drunkard from an excess of indulgence in youth". Ultimately, only Ralph Hattersley and Lord Lowborough manage to reform their lives. Arthur and Lord Lowborough particularly seem affected by the traditional signs of alcoholism.^[9] They frequently drink themselves into incoherence and on awakening, they drink again to feel better. Lord Lowborough understands that he has a problem and, with willpower and strenuous effort, overcomes his addiction. Arthur continues drinking even after he injures himself falling from a horse, which eventually leads to his death. Ralph, although he drinks heavily with his friends, does not seem to be as much afflicted by alcoholism as by his way of life. Mr Grimsby continues his degradation, going from bad to worse and eventually dying in a brawl. Huntingdon's son Arthur becomes addicted to alcohol through his father's efforts, but Helen begins to add to his wine a small quantity of tartar emetic, "just enough to produce inevitable nausea and depression without positive sickness". Very soon the boy begins to be made to feel ill by the very smell of alcohol.

Gender relations

Hannah More's belief in the "moral superiority" of women had strongly influenced Victorian domestic ideology.^[11]

In discussing Brontë's narrative strategy, Carol N. Senf compares The Tenant with Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale: in both novels female narrative is retold by a man. Brontë, like Atwood, "makes the reader wonder whether any two individuals could achieve the kind of equal relationship Gilbert seems to desire in a society that encourages inequality. Certainly, Helen's silence is in some ways as troubling to twentieth-century readers as Offred's, though Gilbert is much kinder and more thoughtful about his superior position than [Professor] Pieixoto."^[12]

According to Priti Joshi, in The Tenant Anne challenges the central tenet of 19th-century domestic ideology – women's influence on men – famously postulated by Hannah More. This doctrine found its way into even "protofeminist" novels such as Jane Eyre, where the main heroine fulfills (or reduces) her ambitions for a wider life by taming and managing her husband. In The Tenant, however, masculinity is impervious to the softening or "superior" influence of women. Marrying Arthur, Helen is convinced that she can reform him, but six years later she escapes from him to protect herself and her young son. Helen's second husband, Gilbert Markham, who despite many faults is "more pliable", never shows any noticeable reform throughout the novel. Joshi concludes that Gilbert is "tottering toward a new form of masculinity" together with Jack Halford, his close friend, by exchanging^{[lower-alpha 1]} confidences and, by learning to communicate and reveal emotions, doing what is considered to be feminine, he can redeem himself, become a new man and a worthy husband of Helen.^[11]

Of all Arthur's friends, only Walter Hargrave has never been a heavy drinker. He uses this as manipulation in an attempt to win Helen's favour. When it doesn't work, he starts speculating that she cannot manage her life after leaving Arthur without a man's protection and supervision.

Gilbert's mother, Mrs Markham, holds the doctrine prevailing at the time that it is "the husband's business to please himself, and hers [i.e. the wife's] to please him". The portrayal of Helen, courageous and independent, emphasizes her capacity for seeking autonomy rather than submitting to male authority, and the corrective role of women in relation to men. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is thus considered a feminist novel by many critics.^[13]

Marriage

See also: Coverture

Portrait of an English married couple, circa 1780

Until the passing of the Married Women's Property Act in 1870 a wife had no independent existence under English law, and therefore no right to own property or to enter into contracts separately from her husband, or to sue for divorce, or for the control and custody of her children.^[14] As expressed in Hugo Black's dissent in United States v. Yazell, "This rule [coverture] has worked out in reality to mean that though the husband and wife are one, the one is the husband."^[15]

Helen is misled by ideas of romantic love and duty into the delusion that she can repair her husband's conduct.^[9] Hattersley declares that he wants a pliant wife who will not interfere with his fun, but the truth is that he really wants quite the opposite. Milicent cannot resist her mother's pressure, so she marries Ralph against her will. Wealthy Annabella wants only a title, while Lord Lowborough devotedly loves her. The social climber Jane Wilson seeks wealth.

Woman artist

Self-portrait – one form of artist's self-identification

According to Stevie Davies, Anne's depiction of the woman as fee-earning artist "trebly trespasses on the domain of the masculine: female artists dabbed in water-colours or sketched decoratively in pen and ink; ladies did not engage in trade; and, besides, tools of her trade [legally belonging to her husband] in this case count as stolen."^[13] Melinda Maunsell believes that Helen is "both revealed and concealed by her artistic hand; providing her with an acceptable means of expression within her social construction, the artists hand also offers a form of independence, a possibility of earning a living, in a period when a woman had virtually no independent power base in any sphere."^[16]

The story of Helen Graham, according to Samantha Ellis, may have inspired Emily Mary Osborn's painting Nameless and Friendless (1857), which depicts a widow attempting to make a living as an artist.^[17]

Nicole A. Diederich has argued that in The Tenant Anne Brontë constructs marriage and remarriage as a comparative and competitive practice that restricts Helen's rights and talents. Helen's artistic ability plays a central role in her relationships with both Gilbert and Arthur. Her alternating freedom to paint and inability to do so on her own terms not only complicate Helen's definition as wife, widow, and artist, but also enable Anne Brontë to criticize the domestic sphere as established by marriage and re-established with remarriage.

At the beginning of her diary, the young and unmarried Helen already defines herself as an artist. Her early drawings reveal her private and true feelings for Arthur Huntingdon, feelings that lead her to overlook his true character and lose herself to marriage. Nevertheless, in addition to revealing Helen's true desires, the self-expression of her artwork also defines her as an artist. That she puts so much of herself into her paintings and drawings attests to this self-definition. After her marriage to Arthur, Helen, accepting the roles of wife and housekeeper, rarely refers to herself as an artist. The marital laws of the day made Helen's artworks legally belong to her husband and allowed Arthur to destroy them when he discovered her plans to earn money by selling paintings. Diederich calls it "an ironic echo" of Helen's destruction of Arthur's portrait just before their engagement when he tried to take it from her. Diederich also points that in attempt to become a fee-earning artist "Helen reclaims her artistic talent as her own, distinct from her husband's possession of her art, and of her."

Posing as a widow, Helen makes her role as an artist who sells her works, especially to support a child, more socially acceptable. Resembling the time of Arthur's courtship, when Helen's portraits of him betrayed her affection, artwork once again serves the autobiographical role during her meetings with Gilbert – the painting of Wildfell Hall deceptively labelled "Fernley Manor" discloses her precarious position as a runaway wife. Showing Gilbert handling Helen's paintings without her permission, Brontë, according to Diederich, "hints that remarriage to Gilbert may not hold any greater promise to Helen's self-definition and freedom as an artist than did her first marriage". However, unlike Arthur, Gilbert shows much more esteem for Helen's artwork. Diederich concludes that "the domestic realm, whether established with marriage or re-established in remarriage, doesn't support women's self-definition as artists, nor does it provide a structured setting for the unfettered expression of their talents" and that The Tenant calls for "more support for married and remarried women's legal rights and artistic opportunities in nineteenth-century Britain".^[18]

Style and narrative

Sisters' connection

Thomas Moore's biography of Byron

Stevie Davies believes that the settings and characters in The Tenant are influenced by Anne's juvenile fiction. In their childhood Emily and Anne Brontë created the imaginary kingdom of Gondal, about which they composed prose and poems. Thomas Moore's biography of Byron, with its description of womanizing, gaming and carousing, directly influenced the Gondal mythos and was echoed in Brontë's adult works. The characteristics of Arthur Huntington and Annabella Wilmot, both self-indulgent sexual transgressors, may be the relics of Gondal, where most of the main heroes were extravagant and led adventurous lives.

Four houses in the younger Brontës' novels have "W. H." initials: Wellwood House in Agnes Grey, the eponymous mansion in Wuthering Heights, and Wildfell Hall and Woodford Hall in The Tenant. The original "Ur-hall" in Gondal may be the source of inspiration for at least two of them—Wuthering Heights and Wildfell Hall. Citing all this, Davies concludes that Charlotte's statement that Anne "hated her work [on The Tenant]" is not credible.^[13]

Genre

Contemporary reviews

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall challenged the prevailing morals of the Victorian era. Especially shocking was Helen's slamming of her bedroom door in the face of her husband after continuing abuse. Charles Kingsley, in his review for Fraser's Magazine wrote: "A people's novel of a very different school is The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. It is, taken altogether, a powerful and an interesting book. Not that it is a pleasant book to read, nor, as we fancy, has it been a pleasant book to write; still less has it been a pleasant training which could teach an author such awful facts, or give courage to write them. The fault of the book is coarseness—not merely that coarseness of subject which will be the stumbling-block of most readers, and which makes it utterly unfit to be put into the hands of girls..." Despite this, he believed that: "[English] society owes thanks, not sneers, to those who dare to shew her the image of her own ugly, hypocritical visage".^[26][27]

Charles Kingsley believed that English society "owes thanks, not sneers" to Anne Brontë

The Spectator wrote: "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, like its predecessor [Jane Eyre],^{[lower-alpha 3]} suggests the idea of considerable abilities ill applied. There is power, effect, and even nature, though of an extreme kind, in its pages; but there seems in the writer a morbid love for the coarse, not to say the brutal; so that his level subjects are not very attractive, and the more forcible are displeasing or repulsive, from their gross, physical, or profligate substratum. He might reply, that such things are in life... Mere existence, however, as we have often had occasion to remark, is not a sufficient reason for a choice of subject: its general or typical character is a point to consider, and its power of pleasing must be regarded, as well as its mere capabilities of force or effect. It is not only the subject of this novel, however, that is objectionable, but the manner of treating it. There is a coarseness of tone throughout the writing of all these Bells [Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë], that puts an offensive subject in its worst point of view, and which generally contrives to dash indifferent things".^[28]

A critic in The Athenaeum, probably H. F. Chorley, cited The Tenant as "the most entertaining novel we have read in a month past". However, he warned the authors, having in mind all the novels from Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell published by 1848, "against their fancy for dwelling upon what is disagreeable".^[29]

The Examiner, while praising all Brontës as "a hardy race", who "do not lounge in drawing-rooms or boudoirs", and "not common-place writers", considered The Tenant's frame structure "a fatal error: for, after so long and minute a history [of Helen's marriage to Arthur], we cannot go back and recover the enthusiasm which we have been obliged to dismiss a volume and half before". The gossiping of the inhabitants of Linden-Car village reminded it of Jane Austen's style, but "with less of that particular quality which her dialogues invariably possessed". Considering the novel's structure as "faulty", Examiner concludes that "it is scarcely possible to analyze [the novel]".^[30]

The Athenaeum was one of a few magazines that was not hostile towards The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

An American magazine Literature World, believing all the novels by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell were produced by the same person, praised their author as a genius, who can make "his incongruities appear natural". Noting, that "all that is good or attractive about [the male characters in The Tenant] is or might be womanish" it supposes that the author may be "some gifted and retired woman". Despite considering The Tenant "infinitely inferior" to Jane Eyre, Literature World admits that the two novels share "the same mysterious word-painting" with which the author "conveys the scene he (or she) describes to the mind's eye, so as not only to impress it with the mere view, but to speak, as it were, to the imagination, to the inner sense, as is ever the case with the Poetry as the Painting of real genius". Again having in mind both Jane Eyre and The Tenant, it concludes: "However objectionable these works may be to crude minds which cannot winnow the chaff vulgarity from the rich grain of genius which burdens them, very many, while enjoying the freshness and vigour, will gladly hail their appearance, as boldly and eloquently developing blind places of wayward passion in the human heart, which is far more interesting to trace than all bustling traces and murky alleys, through which the will-o'-the-wisp genius of Dickens has so long led the public mind".^[31]

Edwin Percy Whipple from North American Review considered The Tenant "less unpleasant" than Wuthering Heights. However, both novels, in his opinion, were constructed with an "excessive clumsiness" and "the brutal element of human nature" was equally "given prominence" in them. He continues: "[The Tenant] seems a convincing proof, that there is nothing kindly in [this]author's powerful mind, and that, if he continues to write novels, he will introduce into the land of romance a larger number of hateful men and women than any other author of the day". In Gilbert he sees "nothing good, except rude honesty", and while acknowledging Helen's "strong-mindedness", he finds no "lovable or feminine virtues". Despite this, Whipple praised novels characterization: "All the characters are drawn with great power and precision of outline, and the scenes are vivid as the life itself." Helen's marriage to Arthur he sees as "a reversal of the process carried on in Jane Eyre", but Arthur Huntingdon, in his opinion, is "no Rochester". "He is never virtuously inclined, except in those periods of illness and feebleness which his debaucheries have occasioned". Whipple concludes: "The reader of Acton Bell gains no enlarged view of mankind, giving a healthy action to his sympathies, but is confined to a narrow space of life, and held down, as it were, by main force, to witness the wolfish side of his nature literally and logically set forth. But the criminal courts are not the places in which to take a comprehensive view of humanity and the novelist who confines his observation to them is not likely to produce any lasting impression except of horror and disgust".^[32]

Sharpe's London Magazine, believing "despite reports to the contrary" that "[no] woman could have written such a work",^{[lower-alpha 4]} warned its readers, especially ladies, against reading The Tenant. While acknowledging "the powerful interest of the story", "the talent with which it is written" and an "excellent moral", it argued that "like the fatal melody of the Syren's song, its very perfections render it more dangerous, and therefore more carefully to be avoided".^[34] In Sharpe's opinion, the novel's "evils which render the work unfit for perusal" arose from "a perverted taste and an absence of mental refinement in the writer, together with a total ignorance of the usages of good society". It argues that the scenes of debauchery "are described with a disgustingly truthful minuteness, which shows the writer to be only too well acquainted with the revolting details of such evil revelry" and considers it a final "proof of the unreadableness of these volumes". Helen's belief in Universal salvation was also castigated: "The dangerous tendency of such a belief must be apparent to any one who gives the subject a moment's consideration; and it becomes scarcely necessary, in order to convince our readers of the madness of trusting to such a forced distortion of the Divine attribute of mercy, to add that this doctrine is alike repugnant to Scripture, and in direct opposition to the teaching of the Anglican Church".^[35]

The Rambler, arguing that Jane Eyre and The Tenant were written by the same person, stated that the latter is "not so bad a book as Jane Eyre", which it believed to be "one of the coarsest of the books we ever perused". The Reverend Michael Millward was considered by Rambler as "one of the least disagreeable individuals" in the novel, while Helen's Universalist views were criticised as either "false and bad" or "vague and unmeaning". It concludes: "Unless our authoress can contrive to refine and elevate her general notions of all human and divine things, we shall be glad to learn that she is not intending to add another work to those which have already been produced by her pen".^[36]

G. H. Lewes, in Leader Magazine, shortly after Anne's death, wrote: "Curious enough is to read Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and remember that the writers were two retiring, solitary, consumptive girls! Books, coarse even for men, coarse in language and coarse in conception, the coarseness apparently of violence and uncultivated men – turn out to be the productions of two girls living almost alone, filling their loneliness with quiet studies, and writing their books from a sense of duty, hating the pictures they drew, yet drawing them with austere conscientiousness! There is matter here for the moralist or critic to speculate on".^[37]

Suppression and subsequent criticism

A great success on initial publication, The Tenant was almost forgotten in subsequent years. When it became due for a reprint, just over a year after Anne's death, Charlotte prevented its re-publication. (The novel was out of print in England until 1854, but not in America, which had no copyright restriction.) Some critics believe that Charlotte's suppression of the book was to protect her younger sister's memory from further onslaughts. Others believe Charlotte was jealous of her younger sister.^[38] Even before Anne's death Charlotte had criticized the novel, stating in a letter to W.S. Williams: "That it had faults of execution, faults of art, was obvious, but faults of intention of feeling could be suspected by none who knew the writer. For my part, I consider the subject unfortunately chosen – it was one the author was not qualified to handle at once vigorously and truthfully. The simple and natural – quiet description and simple pathos – are, I think Acton Bell's forte. I liked Agnes Grey better than the present work."^[39] Juliet Barker, in her biography of the Brontës, concluded that "Charlotte, it appears, was prepared to consign her sister's novel to oblivion because she considered its subject at odds with her own perception of what Anne's character was and ought to have been."^[20]

Elizabeth Gaskell repeated Charlotte's words about Anne in The Life of Charlotte Brontë, claiming that the subject of The Tenant "was painfully discordant to one who would fain have sheltered herself from all but peaceful and religious ideas".^[40] In his essay on Emily Brontë, Algernon Charles Swinburne briefly mentioned The Tenant in the context of Branwell's decline as a novel "which deserves perhaps a little more notice and recognition than it has ever received" and added that "as a study of utterly flaccid and invertebrate immorality it bears signs of more faithful transcription from life than anything in Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights".^[41] Margaret Oliphant believed that Anne "would have no right to be considered at all as a writer but for her association with [her sisters'] imperative spirits".^[42] Mary Ward, a novelist, who was widely known for her anti-feminist views,^[43] in her introduction to 1900 edition of The Tenant, accused Anne of "the narrowness of view" and absence of "some subtle, innate correspondence between eye and brain, between brain and hand, [which] was present in Emily and Charlotte". She concluded that "it is not as the writer of Wildfell Hall, but as the sister of Charlotte and Emily Brontë, that Anne Brontë escapes oblivion."^[44] May Sinclair, while famously saying that "when [Anne] slammed the door of Mrs Huntingdon's bedroom she slammed it in the face of society and all existing moralities and conventions", considered that she "had no genius". Despite that, her opinion about The Tenant was unexpectedly high: "There are scenes, there are situations, in Anne's amazing novel, which for sheer audacity stand alone in mid-Victorian literature, and which would hold their own in the literature of revolt that followed... Her diagnosis of certain states, her realization of certain motives, suggests Balzac rather than any of the Brontës." In her introduction to the 1914 edition of the novel Sinclair was also ambivalent about Anne and her novel — while acclaiming it as "the first presentment of that Feminist novel", she stated that "it bores to tears". Her opinion of Helen was also mixed: "If Agnes Grey is a little prig, Helen Huntingdon is a prig enormous... She is Anne Brontë's idea of noble womanhood, the first of the modern, large-souled, intellectual heroines." The only thing Sinclair wholly approved of was the author's treatment of marital laws of the time: "Anne Brontë attacks her problem with a freedom and audacity before which her sisters' boldest enterprises seem cowardly and restrained... Her behaviour is the least unusual, not to say revolutionary."^[45]

Novelist Geroge Moore, an admirer of Anne Brontë's novels

Despite the general dismissiveness of the late 19th–early 20th century critics, Anne still had supporters in literary circles. Esther Alice Chadwick, while believing that Anne lacked "the fire and passion of her sisters"^[46] and was "inferior" to them,^[47] claimed that she is still "a character well worth studying".^[48] Chadwick also considered The Tenant to be "probably the first temperance novel".^[49] George Moore, an Anglo-Irish writer, was an admirer of Anne Brontë's novels; he believed that Anne "had all the qualities of Jane Austen and other qualities", that "she could write with heat", and if "she had lived ten years longer she would have taken a place beside Jane Austen, perhaps even a higher place". He declared that The Tenant had "the rarest literary quality of heat", and blamed Charlotte Brontë for her youngest sister's loss of reputation.^[50]

Only in 1929 the first dedicated biography of Anne came out – it was a short monograph by W. T. Hale,^{[lower-alpha 5]} where he stated that in the "ideas and situations", presented in The Tenant, Anne "was way ahead of her times" and that "she rushed in where Thackeray dared not tread." However, Hale believed that Anne "will never be known to fame either as novelist or poet, but only as the sister of Charlotte and Emily."^[52]

In 1959, two biographies were published: Anne Brontë, her life and work by Ada Harrison and Derek Stanford and Anne Brontë by Winifred Gérin. Noting that The Tenant was published some ten years before George Eliot's novels, Harrison and Stanford named Anne the "first realist woman writer" in Great Britain.^[53] Unlike some early critics, who considered the scenes of debauchery improbable,^[27][54] Harrison and Stanford believed them to be "described in a fashion which Zola might have admired".^[55] Winifred Gérin believed Helen Graham to be "one of the first married women in fiction who is both competent and resolved to keep herself not by any of the accepted means as housekeeper, companion or governess, but as a painter, selling her canvasses to dealers."^[56] Despite this, in her later work on the Brontës, Gérin dismissed The Tenant as being "written too obviously as a work of propaganda, a treatise against drunkenness, to be considered a work of art".^[57] Several years later, however, Gérin wrote an introduction to The Tenant, where, while considering the framed structure in both The Tenant and Wuthering Heights a "clumsy devise", acknowledged Anne's "pre-eminent gift of story-teller" and "eloquence in proclaiming the equality of men and women". She believed that The Tenant "might be said to be the first manifesto for 'Women's Lib'".^[58] Inga-Stina Ewbank considered Anne the least talented of the sisters^[59] and claimed that the framing structure – where "Helen can reveal her innermost being to the diary" while Gilbert is "bound to be as objective as possible" – "throws the novel out of balance".^[60] However, she believed that "through the very nature of its central concern, The Tenant is feminist in the deepest sense of the word."^[61]

Branwell Brontë

Daphne du Maurier discussed The Tenant in the context of the biography of Anne's brother, Branwell Brontë. Du Maurier praised the narrative structure, "two separate stories most cleverly combined in one", and believed Gilbert Markham "with his utter confidence in his powers of attracting the opposite sex" to be modelled on Branwell. Presuming that he was familiar with his sisters' novels, du Maurier believed that the story of Helen's marital life with Arthur Huntingdon may have been "a warning to Branwell" and the relationship between "erring, neglectful husband" and "the pious, praying wife" resembles Branwell's views on the marriage of Lydia Robinson, the woman at whose house he was employed as a tutor to her son, while Anne was governess to her daughters.^[62] Du Maurier concluded that in childhood years Branwell "shared in his sister's writings; somehow he must continue to live out their characters in the world of his imagination".^[63]

In her early essays on Anne Brontë's novels and poetry Muriel Spark praised her proficiency. She believed that Charlotte was a "harsh sister to Anne" and "had she taken an impartial view of Wildfell Hall, she must have discovered its merits."^[64] Despite notion that Charlotte and Emily were "more gifted", Spark stated that "[Anne's] writings none the less take no mean place in nineteenth-century literature."^[65] However, some forty years later, in the introduction to The Essence of the Brontës, Spark radically changed her views on Anne: "I do not now agree with my former opinion on Anne Brontë's value as a writer. I think her works are not good enough to be considered in any serious context of the nineteenth century novel or that there exists any literary basis for comparison with the brilliant creative works of Charlotte and Emily... She was a writer who could 'pen' a story well enough; she was a literary equivalent of a decent water-colourist."^[66]

Only in the last decades of the 20th century The Tenant began to get critical acclaim. Elizabeth Langland in her 1989 monograph Anne Brontë: The Other One said: "It is worth pausing briefly to reflect on what might have been Anne's fate had The Tenant of Wildfell Hall been re-published with Agnes Grey so that critics could re-acquaint themselves with Anne's greater novel and so that critics could take that opportunity to measure the substantial artistic growth between the two novels."^[67] Langland argued that the heroines in Anne's novels influenced those of Charlotte, and named Anne among the first women writers to adopt a woman as narrator.^[68] Langland concluded that "if Charlotte Brontë was radical in claiming sexual identity for women, then Anne Brontë was radical in claiming professional identity for women."^[69] Robert Liddell, noting Anne's apparent distaste for Romantic tradition, claimed that The Tenant criticized both Branwell's life and Wuthering Heights.^[70] Edward Chitham in A Life of Anne Brontë (1991) also juxtaposed the novels of Anne and her sisters'.^[71] He stated that in Anne's view Wuthering Heights exhibited elements which she called in the preface to the second edition of The Tenant a "soft nonsense", thus making "almost an accusation against Emily".^[72] Unlike Chitham and Liddell, Maria H. Frawley identified the central element in The Tenant as the criticism of 19th century domestic ideology that encouraged women to "construct themselves as ethereal angels of morality and virtue".^[73] Betty Jay, analyzing Helen's marital experience, concluded that The Tenant "not only demonstrates that the individual is subject to powerful ideological forces which delineate his or her place within culture and society, but that there are ways in which these forces can be subverted and resisted by those who suffer as a result. In a narrative which dramatizes the complex interplay between subject and society by focusing on the marital experience of a woman, Brontë highlights the extent to which the internal and supposedly private realms of desire and domesticity are also intensely political."^[74]

The Tenant has established its reputation as a landmark feminist text.^[75] In her 1996 introduction to the novel, Stevie Davies called it "a feminist manifesto of revolutionary power and intelligence".^[13] The novel's framing structure, long dismissed as faulty, started to get acclaim as a fitting narrative device, essential to Anne's critical and artistic purposes.^[24][25][12]

On 5 November 2019, the BBC News listed The Tenant of Wildfell Hall on its list of the 100 most influential novels.^[76]

Notes

References

Sources