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 the same subject as her sisters, Anne presents it in completely different light. Wildfell Hall, an old superannuated mansion, she pictures not as a ‘haunted’ house like Thornfield Hall or Wuthering Heights in her sisters' works, but as a decayed relic of an outworn patrician class, whose pretensions are mocked by the recrudescence of building into moor. Stevie Davies has argued that Anne's ancient hall demystifies Gothic. Wildfell Hall is not haunted, it is simply dilapidated, damp and un-welcoming. Anne's portrayal of Arthur Huntingdon deflates Byronic cult – while witty, adventurous and handsome, he is not endowed with intellectual gifts,