An imprident and bitterly unhappy marriage, followed by the wife's
departure and determined bid for freedom.Set in the rakish Regency society
and written during the 1840s when the oppression of women was at its
height, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is extraordinary for its impassioned
and bold treatment of the issue of women's equality. The slamming of
Helen's bedroom door against her husband, wrote one critic, reverberated
throughout Victorian England. In short, Wildfell Hall can be said to be
the first sustained feminist novel.Much of Anne Brontë's painful experience
acquired while she was a governess is imprinted on the action of the novel.
Nevertheless, the story of Helen Huntingdon and her swaggering, debauched
husband, and of Gilbert Markham, the man who falls in love with Helen, is
notable for its honesty, psychological truth and burning sincerity - and
for its startling modernity.