The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a powerful and sometimes violent novel of expectation, love, oppression, sin, religion and betrayal. It portrays the disintegration of the marriage of Helen Huntingdon, the mysterious tenant of the title, and her dissolute, alcoholic husband. Defying convention, Helen leaves her husband to protect their young son from his father's influence, and earns her own living as an artist. Whilst in hiding at Wildfell Hall, she encounters Gilbert Markham, who falls in love with her. On its first publication in 1848, Anne Brontë's second novel was criticized for being "coarse" and "brutal". The Tenant of Wildfell Hall challenges the social conventions of the early nineteenth century in a strong defense of women's rights in the face of psychological abuse from their husbands. Anne Brontë's style is bold, naturalistic and passionate, and this novel, which her sister Charlotte considered "an entire mistake", has earned her a position in English Literature in her own right.
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Anne Brontë (1820–1849) was born in Yorkshire, the youngest of six children. Her mother died within a year of her birth, and her two eldest siblings died four years later. The Brontë children were raised in an isolated Yorkshire parsonage, where they thrived in fantasy worlds that drew on their voracious reading of Byron, Scott, Shakespeare, and Gothic fiction. Anne’s first novel, Agnes Grey, was published in a volume together with Emily’s Wuthering Heights in 1847. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall reflects her brother Branwell’s gradual descent into alcoholism, drug addiction, and madness. Both Branwell and Emily died of tuberculosis in 1848; Anne succumbed to the same illness in 1849.
Carole Boyd’s theater work includes a year performing with Alan Ayckbourn’s Scarborough Company where she created the role of June in Way Upstream, while her television credits include Hetty Wainthropp Investigates and Mystery!: Campion. Boyd also plays the notorious Lynda Snell in The Archers, is a regular reader on BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please, and has won three audiobook awards for her recordings.
David Rintoul, an Earphones Award–winning narrator, is a stage and television actor from Scotland. A former student of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, he has worked extensively with the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. He has also appeared regularly on BBC television, starring as Mr. Darcy in the 1980 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and as Doctor Finlay in the television series of the same name.