The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Published in June 1848, less than a year before her death, Anne Bronte's second (and last) novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, is the somber account of the breakdown of a marriage in the face of alcoholism and infidelity. The novel enjoyed a modest success that led its publisher, theunscrupulous T.C. Newby, to issue a "Second Edition" less than two months later. The present edition, which completes the Clarendon Edition of the Novels of the Brontes, offers a text based on the collation of the first edition with the second. The introduction details the work's composition andearly printing history, including its first publication in America; and the text is fully annotated. Appendices record the substantive variants in the first English and American editions, and discuss the author's belief in the doctrine of universal salvation.

Anne Brontë, who was born in 1820, was brought up in the Yorkshire village of Haworth where her father was curate. She was educated at home and, as a child, she invented with her sister Emily the imaginary world of Gondal, for which she wrote copious chronicles and poems. She held two positions as governess, with the Inghams at Blake Hall and, from 1840-45, with the Robinson family at Thorp Green. As a religious lyric poet, Anne Brontë’s hymns and lyrics rank with those of Cowper. Her first novel Agnes Grey (1847), published under the pseudonym Acton Bell, is in the tradition of fictional spiritual autobiography, written with conciseness, integrity and irony. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) is a powerful feminist testament, attacking the marriage laws, double standards of sexual morality and the education of men and women. Anne Brontë died at Scarborough in 1849. She was the youngest of the Brontë sisters, whose extraordinary gifts are only now receiving just appraisal.

Stevie Davies is a novelist, critic, and historian. She is director of creative writing at the University of Wales at Swansea.

Stevie Davies is a novelist, critic, and historian. She is director of creative writing at the University of Wales at Swansea.