The Tenant of Wildfell Hall The Tenant of Wildfell Hall The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is the second and final novel by the English author Anne Brontë. It was first published in 1848 under the pseudonym Acton Bell. Probably the most shocking of the Brontës' novels, it had an instant and phenomenal success, but after Anne's death her sister Charlotte prevented its re-publication. The novel is framed as a series of letters from Gilbert Markham to his friend and brother-in-law about the events connected with the meeting of his wife. A mysterious young widow arrives at Wildfell Hall, an Elizabethan mansion which has been empty
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 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. Only in 1929 the first dedicated biography of Anne came out – it was a short monograph by W. T. Hale, 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 thread." However, Hale believed that Anne "will never be known to fame either as novelist