The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1996 miniseries) The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1996 miniseries) The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a 1996 British television serial adaptation of Anne Brontë's novel of the same name, produced by BBC and directed by Mike Barker. The serial stars Tara Fitzgerald as Helen Graham, Rupert Graves as her abusive husband Arthur Huntington and Toby Stephens as Gilbert Markham. A mysterious young woman arrives at Wildfell Hall, an old mansion of Elizabethan era with a young son. She determines to lead an independent existence, but her new neighbours don't want to let her alone. Only one of them, a young farmer, Gilbert
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall women in fiction who is both competent and resolved to keep herself not be any of the accepted means as housekeeper, companion or governess, but as a painter, selling her canvasses to dealers." Despite this, in her later work on the Brontës, Gérin dismissed "The Tenant" as being "written too obviously as a work of propaganda, a treatise against drunkenness, to be considered a work of art." Several years later, however, Gérin wrote an introduction to "The Tenant", where, while considering the framed structure in both "The Tenant" and "Wuthering Heights" a "clumsy devise," acknowledged Anne's "pre-eminent gift of story-teller"