Anne Brontë (1820–1849) was the youngest of the Brontë sisters, daughter of the Reverend Patrick Brontë of Haworth in Yorkshire. She worked as a governess, most notably for the Robinson family at Thorp Green from 1840 to 1845, and published poems with her sisters in 1846 and two novels under the name Acton Bell: Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). Her poetry and fiction express a serious, hopeful Christian faith. She died of tuberculosis at Scarborough in May 1849, aged twenty-nine.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Brontë's second novel, is told in letters written in 1847 by the farmer Gilbert Markham to his friend and brother-in-law Jack Halford, enclosing a long diary. In the autumn of 1827 a young widow calling herself Mrs. Graham takes rooms in the half-ruined Elizabethan mansion of Wildfell Hall with her small son Arthur and an old servant, Rachel.
