Vaggeryds bibliotek

Escaping from the confines of a bad marriage a woman shows up at the dilapidated mansion Wildfell Hall ready to start her life over.

A bold and powerful novel, Anne Brontë’s "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" (1848) is the story of Helen who defies conventions to find her true self. It portrays an aristocratic society steeped in patriarchal values and the marital strife Helen faces as her dissolute husband turns to drink. Fleeing with her son, she settles in the reclusive Elizabethan mansion, Wildfell Hall, to pursue an artist’s career.

This novel is told through letters and diary entries and explores the rich inner life of Helen. Its depiction of social norms and the desire to break free from social stagnation has made critics label it as one of the first fully-fledged feminist novels.

"The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" is Anne Brontë’s second and final novel. It was a great success that caused uproar upon publication and nothing short of a must-read masterpiece for fans of Victorian literature.


Anne Brontë (1820-1849) was the youngest of the Brontë sisters and only wrote two novels during her short but influential career.

Unlike the romantic aspirations of her older and more famous sisters, Charlotte and Emily, Anne instead infused her writing with irony and sarcasm and was regarded as the more radical of the sisters.

She wrote about women’s need to maintain independence, doing so under the guise of a male pen name, Acton Bell. Her two novels "Agnes Grey" (1846) and "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" (1848) challenged social and legal structures in Victorian Britain before she died from complications from tuberculosis at the age of 29.