The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Vintage Classics Bronte Series)

Format:

Buy the book from:

Amazon Blackwells Bookshop.org Foyles Hive TGJones Waterstones

Helen Graham has come to Wildfell Hall to be left alone. The village has other ideas.

When Helen Graham arrives at Wildfell Hall, she brings with her a young son, a guarded manner and no wish to explain herself.

To the people around her, that is enough. Rumours gather quickly around the mysterious young widow: about where she has come from, what she is hiding and what kind of woman would choose such a lonely life. Gilbert Markham is drawn to her reserve, but affection does not give him the right to her story.

What Helen carries in silence is a past shaped by love, betrayal, religious conviction and the realities of a destructive marriage. As Gilbert begins to understand more, Anne Brontë turns a village mystery into something far braver: a Victorian novel about reputation, survival and a woman’s right to protect herself and her child.

Frank about drunkenness, adultery and the limits of marital obedience, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall shocked Victorian readers when it was first published. It remains one of the most courageous Brontë novels, and one of the most powerful classics about marriage, judgement and hard-won independence.

One of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World

VINTAGE CLASSICS BRONTE SERIES: beautiful editions, three iconic stories, three extraordinary women.

'A powerful novel of expectation, love, oppression, sin, religion and betrayal' Daily Mail

'Courageous and controversial' The Times

A beautiful gift, and perfect gems for bookworms.
So Darling

About Anne Brontë

Anne Brontë was born at Thornton in Yorkshire on 17 January 1820, the youngest of six children. That April, the Brontës moved to Haworth, a village on the edge of the moors, where Anne’s father had become the curate. Anne’s mother died soon afterwards. She was four when her older sisters were sent to the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, where Maria and Elizabeth both caught tuberculosis and died. After that, Anne, Charlotte, Emily and Branwell were taught at home for a few years, and together, they created vivid fantasy worlds which they explored in their writing. Anne went to Roe Head School 1835–7. She worked as a governess with the Ingham
family (1839–40) and with the Robinson family (1840–45). In 1846, along with Charlotte and Emily, she published Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. She published Agnes Grey in 1847 and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in 1848. That year, both Anne’s brother Branwell and her sister Emily died of tuberculosis. A fortnight later, Anne was diagnosed with the same disease. She died in
Scarborough on 28 May 1849.

Learn more

Details