![]() ![]() ![]() Sinclair had mixed feelings about Anne’s technical abilities as a novelist, stating that ‘but for that startling and reverberating sound, there isn’t one enlivening thrill, not one, in all the long pages of Anne’s novel’, making this a rather contradictory introduction and hardly a recommendation for the book. As Helen tells the young, unmarried Esther Hargrave, ‘You might as well sell yourself to slavery’. The wife, too, was her husband’s property although he could divorce her, she had no right to do so herself, and to leave without permission was a crime. ![]() Under law, the wife’s property – including anything she already owned, inherited or subsequently earned – was her husband’s, as were any children. When the novel was first published in 1848, that slam had echoed throughout Victorian England, a culture in which, as a mother tells her son in the novel, it was considered a husband’s business to ‘please himself’ and a wife’s duty to ‘please him’. ![]() When Anne depicted her protagonist, Helen Huntingdon, slamming her bedroom door in her abusive husband’s face, wrote Sinclair, ‘she slammed it in the face of society and all existing moralities and conventions’. In her introduction to the 1914 edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the author and critic May Sinclair reminded her fellow Modernists how radical Anne Brontë’s second and final novel had been. Steve Carver looks at ‘The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’, Anne Brontë’s second, and final, novel ![]()
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