“The Tenant of Wildfell Hall”

“The Tenant of Wildfell Hall” (1848) is one of two novels by Anne Brontë, the youngest of three literary sisters; Charlotte and Emily were her older sisters. Charlotte Brontë wrote “Jane Eyre” (1847) and “Villette” (1853), among other works, and Emily wrote “Wuthering Heights” (1847). You probably know those classic novels or video versions well, maybe Anne’s less so.

Anne wrote under the pseudonym of Acton Bell, and her career was very short, two reasons why her works, including poetry, may be less familiar now. She died in 1849 at 29 years of age. Yet, she is to be remembered for her literary accomplishments as part of an amazing literary sisterhood

Anne Brontë’s novel resonates from the past to the modern world in that it speaks to the sometimes desperate and frustrating lives then of women in the fallout of idle, dissolute male privilege. The story revolves around two very different views of rearing a male child, views which are shown to cross class levels, upper and yeoman.

Today, we cannot imagine making a child drink and favor wine as part of his manning-up, but that is what was at stake in this story. To allow that as a mother or not? The idle adult men inhaled wine on a daily basis and took that to be part of their manhood. They were awful examples. They were no more than alcoholics really in the modern view. They tried to include the child.

A wonderful, alternate love story grows out of the trying and gender-conflicted first marriage for Mrs. Helen Graham, after much ado in hiding from her husband with her son Arthur at dusty old Wildfell Hall, away from his despotic ways and those of his drinking associates. There is the warmth of the novel, and likely basis of its broad acclaim in its own time.

It was made into a three-part British Broadcast Company TV series in 1996, which you may still access, and I have. There is also a DVD in the on-line, countywide Library collection that you may borrow. In video medium, it is possible to abbreviate some of the lengthy discourses that make up the written plot, and malicious sub-plots, and then still appreciate the beautiful love story amidst pain and suffering for Mrs. Graham that Anne Brontë conceived.

The video does that. Most noteworthy, it takes a shortcut to the ending in part III, which caught me by surprise, but the ending itself is unchanged from what Anne Brontë intended.

In addition to the DVD, the paper version of the book is available in the on-line collection. Both are accessible with a Library card through the Polaris Integrated Library System that ties all of Westmoreland County together as one collection. It is also available as an e-book and an audiobook, as are many other offerings in the collection. The book is a classic of another century, but still it is available in all the modern formats of our own time. I use it now as an example to make that point to you, which perhaps I should be making more often. Consider the point made now.