#the tenant of wildfell hall

[ladyhawke]

Toby Stephens as Gilbert Markham in THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL Part I.

[afirewiel]

When you get down to it, Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall basically have the same premise. They both feature a protagonist (Jane Eyre/Gilbert Markham) who falls in love with someone (Edward Rochester/Helen Huntingdon) who turns out to be already married. The books are even written by sisters. (Charlotte and Anne Bronte, respectively).

While Rochester and Helen are both unhappy in their marriages (Rochester's wife is insane and Helen's husband is unfaithful and abusive), the way they handle their situations could not be more different though. Rochester keeps his wife locked in the attic and keeps her existence a secret from all but a select few, letting the rest of the world think he is a bachelor. He deceives Jane as well and even tries to marry her, almost committing bigamy in the process. It's only the timely arrival of Rochester's brother-in-law Richard Mason at the wedding that the truth comes out.

Helen, on the other hand, runs away from her husband, taking her young son with her. She pretends to be a widow. But when she realizes Gilbert has fallen in love with her and wants to marry her, she comes clean to him about her marriage and says she cannot marry him because she is married.

Helen acts more nobly than Rochester and yet, of the two novels, it's the latter that was considered controversial at the time it was released with even Charlotte criticizing it for featuring a woman leaving her husband. Helen never tried to commit bigamy but somehow a woman leaving her abusive husband was considered worse at the time. It really is mind blowing.

[hayaomiyazaki]

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall — 1996 dir. Mike Barker, adapted from the novel by Anne Brontë

[fictionadventurer]

I need to get way too excited about this extremely basic edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

It's just an old Barnes and Noble edition. But it's also the best possible cover this book could have in this format. That purple is the perfect color for this book! That picture! Covers of this book usually feature the hall, but this one features Helen! She's an artist! She's looking straight at you! She's demanding to be the focus of the story! It's like it was made for this book!

And then the inside!

That beautiful clear font! The kerning! The white space! It's so beautiful I could cry! That is how you format classic literature so people can actually read it!

I just love how all these little details come together to make this nothing-fancy edition into the ideal copy of this book for me.

[rayatii]

A few years ago, I had the idea of making one of those movies about a girl who falls in love with some asshole “bad boy” with the idea that she can “fix him” with her good influence, but it’s portrayed in a realistic way, and instead of improving, he becomes more and more abusive, until she has to escape.

A couple of days ago, I started reading The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and finished it yesterday… and I realized that Anne Brontë already beat me to it 177 years ago.

[littlestfallenangel]

"You have to forgive the sexism in this book because it was a product of its time" Anne Bronte did not write The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in 1848 just for me to put up with sexist bullshit written a hundred years later.

[softly-and-suddenly]

People are so boring about classic literature sometimes. Like I know it’s cool to be critical of men in books from the 19th century or whatever but it just leads to ripping out all of the nuance in favor of “Uh all of the Brontë men were evil and abusive and that’s all there is to those characters.” Say something interesting. I’m begging you

[bethanydelleman]

My very specific narrative catnip is stepparents who love their stepchildren with their whole hearts and stepchildren who consider their stepparent to be superior to their deadbeat biological parent and who tell them that out loud. And this doesn't have anything to do with my childhood AT ALL.

[quotation--marks]

He is very fond of me - almost TOO fond. I could do with less caressing and more rationality: I should like to be less of a pet and more of a friend, if I might choose - but I won’t complain of that: I am only afraid his affection loses in depth where it gains in ardour. I sometimes liken it to a fire of dry twigs and branches compared with one of solid coal, - very bright and hot, but if it should burn itself out and leave nothing but ashes behind, what shall I do?

Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

[literarylumin]

I'll walk where my own nature would be leading: it vexes me to choose another guide.

- Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

[longtimewish]

When will they stop trying to adapt Wuthering Heights and realize that what we actually need is a new The Tenant of Wildfell Hall adaptation

[margaretofdrum]

Still ruminating on the Brontë seminar I took last year and one of the things I noticed while reading each sister's novels was that there are overarching commonalities between way death is treated in their works. It seems that people tend to think of the Brontës' works as being pervaded by melancholy and a sense of death, which is likely exacerbated by Charlotte, Emily, and Anne all dying so young themselves, but what stood out to me is the way their novels treat death as something that is not exempt from the seriousness of life. Generally speaking, characters' deaths, however dramatic they might be, are only reflections of what actually matters--how they lived. There are peaceful deaths accorded to essentially good-hearted characters like Helen Burns and Edgar Linton, but this trend is most noticeable in the deaths of "bad" characters such as Arthur Huntingdon and Mrs. Reed. In my opinion, the lack of deathbed redemption for these characters is partially explained by the psychologically "real" features of the Brontës' works (not to say that they only depict "realistic" situations or actions, only that characters tend to behave in an un-idealized way that precludes the idea of their being radically changed at the hour of death). Adding to this is that deaths of "bad" characters don't feel vindictive, they just feel sad. In Jane Eyre, for example, Jane's response to her aunt's death is not any feeling of schadenfreude, just sorrow that she lived so poorly: "Poor, suffering woman! it was too late for her to make now the effort to change her habitual frame of mind: living, she had ever hated me—dying, she must hate me still.” A similar situation occurs in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, with Helen writing to her brother about the "miseries" of Arthur's death bed, and expressing regret that Arthur did not take religion seriously during his life, which has led to a situation where he "cannot dream of turning to [it] for consolation now." These scenes are more about how these characters have lived than how they die, and I think that's something that can get lost if death is treated as inherently more serious than life in fiction, be it gothic or otherwise.

[adobongsiopao]

Martha Brown, the loyal servant of the Brontë family revealed to a parsonage visitor about Charlotte Brontë's situation after her two younger sisters Emily and Anne died from consumption. The Brontë sisters used to walk around the dining table at night to discuss and share ideas about writing the plot for their novels.

[fictionadventurer]

I've seen classics with "spoil every plot point in detail" introductions.

I've seen classics with "twist the book so I can analyze it through a specific lens rather than letting you come to your own conclusions based on the actual text" introductions.

But I think the introduction to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, written by some woman (Mary Augusta Ward) who died in 1920, that says "no one would remember this book if Anne Bronte didn't happen to have Emily and Charlotte (actual geniuses) as sisters" might be the worst introduction I've ever seen.

[burningvelvet]

In a letter to W. S. Williams (14 August 1848), Charlotte Brontë compares Jane Eyre’s Rochester to the Byronic heroes of her sisters’ novels, Heathcliff from Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Huntingdon from Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall:

“You say Mr. Huntingdon reminds you of Mr. Rochester. Does he? Yet there is no likeness between the two; the foundation of each character is entirely different. Huntingdon is a specimen of the naturally selfish, sensual, superficial man, whose one merit of a joyous temperament only avails him while he is young and healthy, whose best days are his earliest, who never profits by experience, who is sure to grow worse the older he grows.

Mr. Rochester has a thoughtful nature and a very feeling heart; he is neither selfish nor self-indulgent; he is ill-educated, misguided; errs, when he does err, through rashness and inexperience: he lives for a time as too many other men live, but being radically better than most men, he does not like that degraded life, and is never happy in it. He is taught the severe lessons of experience and has sense to learn wisdom from them. Years improve him; the effervescence of youth foamed away, what is really good in him still remains. His nature is like wine of a good vintage, time cannot sour, but only mellows him. Such at least was the character I meant to portray.

Heathcliffe, again, of Wuthering Heights is quite another creation. He exemplifies the effects which a life of continued injustice and hard usage may produce on a naturally perverse, vindictive, and inexorable disposition. Carefully trained and kindly treated, the black gipsy-cub might possibly have been reared into a human being, but tyranny and ignorance made of him a mere demon. The worst of it is, some of his spirit seems breathed through the whole narrative in which he figures: it haunts every moor and glen, and beckons in every fir-tree of the Heights.”

Source: The Brontës Life and Letters (Clement King Shorter, 2013)