Kevira has picked "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" by Anne Bronte, the lesser known Bronte sister :)
*We moved this from December to January.
Link to free eBook:
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=The+Tenant+of+Wildfell+Hall
ABOUT THE BOOK
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a powerful and sometimes violent novel of
expectation, love, oppression, sin, religion and betrayal. It portrays
the disintegration of the marriage of Helen Huntingdon, the mysterious
tenant of the title, and her dissolute, alcoholic husband. Defying
convention, Helen leaves her husband to protect their young son from his
father's influence, and earns her own living as an artist. Whilst in
hiding at Wildfell Hall, she encounters Gilbert Markham, who falls in
love with her. On its first publication in 1848, Anne Brontë's second
novel was criticised for being 'coarse' and 'brutal'. The Tenant of
Wildfell Hall challenges the social conventions of the early nineteenth
century in a strong defence of women's rights in the face of
psychological abuse from their husbands. Anne Brontë's style is bold,
naturalistic and passionate, and this novel, which her sister Charlotte
considered 'an entire mistake', has earned her a position in English
Literature in her own right.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anne Bronte was born at Thornton, Yorkshire, on January 17, 1820. She
was the sixth and youngest child of Reverend Patrick Bronte, an Irishman
by birth, and Maria Branwell Bronte, who was from a prosperous Cornish
family. Following her mother's death in 1821, Anne and four sisters and
one brother were raised by an aunt, Elizabeth Branwell. The two eldest
daughters, Maris and Elizabeth, died in 1825 from tuberculosis
contracted at the religious boarding school to which they had been sent.
Anne
spent her childhood and formative years in the isolated parsonage at
Haworth, Yorkshire, where her father was curate. The Bronte children all
thrived in fantasy worlds that drew on their voracious reading of
Byron, Scott, and Shakespeare as well as The Arabian Nights and gothic
fiction. Anne and Emily worked together on a saga about the fictitious
island of Gondal while Charlotte and brother Branwell wrote melodramatic
chronicles centered around the imaginary kingdom of Angria.
Financial
considerations forced Anne to seek employment as a governess. In 1839
she arrived at Blake Hall in Mirfield to tutor the children of Joshua
Ingham, a local squire and magistrate. From 1841 to 1845 she was
governess at Thorpe Green, the home of Reverend Edmund Robinson located
twelve miles from York. In 1843 Branwell Bronte also found work as a
tutor at Thorpe Green until suspicions of an illicit relationship with
his employer's wife resulted in dismissal. Branwell's gradual descent
into alcoholism, drug addiction, and madness is reflected in the
writings of all three sisters, particularly in The Tenant of Wildfell
Hall.
The Brontes launched their literary careers in 1846 with a
collection of verse published pseudonymously as Poems by Currer, Ellis
and Acton Bell. In 1847 Anne's first novel, Agnes Grey, was published in
a volume together with Emily's Wuthering Heights. Based on Anne's
experiences as a governess, it exposed the desperate plight of
unmarried, educated women driven to take up the only respectable career
open to them. Though critic George Moore, perhaps Anne's greatest
champion, later deemed it 'the most perfect prose narrative in English
literature,' the work was overshadowed by the intense originality of
Wuthering Heights, not to mention the enormous success of Charlotte's
Jane Eyre, which had appeared a few weeks earlier.
Anne continued
writing; her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, came out in
1848. The bold story of a strong-minded woman's struggle for
independence, the book unmasked the dark brutality of Victorian
chauvinism but was nevertheless attacked by some critics as a
celebration of the very excesses it criticized. Charlotte Bronte, as she
later revealed in the 'Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell'
(1850), was especially disturbed by it: 'The choice of subject was an
entire mistake. Nothing less congruous with the writer's nature could be
conceived. The motives which dictated this choice were pure, but, I
think, slightly morbid.'
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall reminded
other reviewers of Wuthering Heights, and it quickly went to a second
printing. 'Every reader who has felt the power of Jane Eyre and
Wuthering Heights comes, sooner or later, to The Tenant of Wildfell
Hall,' wrote Bronte scholar Margaret Lane. 'Anne Bronte, with all the
Bronte taste for violence and drama, and with her experience of the same
rude scenes and savage Yorkshire tales that had fed the imaginations of
her sisters, did not shrink. She used the material at hand, and shaped
it with singular honesty and seriousness. . . . [One] discovers from
Wildfell Hall that Anne is a true Bronte.'
The final months of
Anne Bronte's life were filled with tragedy. Both Branwell and Emily
died of tuberculosis in the autumn of 1848. Anne Bronte succumbed to the
same illness at Scarborough on May 28, 1849.
