Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Penguin English Library)

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'She looked so like herself that I knew not how to bear it' In this sensational, hard-hitting and passionate tale of marital cruelty, "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" sees a mysterious tenant, Helen Graham, unmasked not as a 'wicked woman' as the local gossips would have it, but as the estranged wife of a brutal alcoholic bully, desperate to protect her son. Using her own experiences with her brother Branwell to depict the cruelty and debauchery from which Helen flees, Anne Bronte wrote her masterpiece to reflect the fragile position of women in society and her belief in universal redemption, but scandalized readers of the time.

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The youngest of the illustrious Bronte siblings, Anne (1820-1849) wrote poetry and fiction throughout her childhood and went on to become a governess, religious lyric poet and novelist, publishing under the pseudonym Acton Bell. The realist and often ironic tone of her novels Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is strikingly different from the more romantic style of her sisters, Charlotte and Emily. Anne died of pulmonary tuberculosis a year after the publication of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, at only twenty-nine years old.