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 father’s farm, and Helen, being a runaway wife, can call neither her home nor her name her own. The emphasis on allusions in the novel, on using the "language of others," according to McDonagh, may be a reflection on the position of being a tenant, which in its subjugation is similar to that of being a wife. Until the passing of the Married Women's Property Act in 1870 a wife had no independent existence under English law, and therefore no right to own property or to enter into contracts separately from her husband, or to sue for divorce, or for