The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Summary

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. She lives quietly by painting landscapes, refuses to let her boy out of her sight, and startles the neighborhood by having given him a dislike of wine. Gilbert, at first piqued, falls in love with her. Gossip spread by the vicar's daughter Eliza Millward links her with her landlord, Frederick Lawrence, and when Gilbert overhears what seems a lovers' conversation he strikes Lawrence from his horse on the road. Helen answers his jealousy by giving him her diary. Its entries, beginning in 1821, show the young Helen at her aunt's house of Staningley, warned against the charming, careless Arthur Huntingdon and marrying him in the confident hope of reforming him. At Grassdale Manor his long absences in London, his drinking parties with Hattersley, Grimsby, Lord Lowborough and Walter Hargrave, and his contempt for her religion wear down her affection. She discovers his affair with Lowborough's wife Annabella, resists Hargrave's advances, and watches Huntingdon teach their little son to drink and swear. When he finds her plan to leave in the diary, he burns her painting materials and takes her money. With help from her brother, who proves to be Frederick Lawrence, she escapes with her son in 1827 to Wildfell Hall under her mother's name. Back in the frame story, Gilbert and Lawrence are reconciled, and Helen asks Gilbert to part from her. She returns to Grassdale when she hears that Huntingdon has been injured in a fall from his horse; his drinking turns the injury fatal, and she nurses him until he dies, unrepentant but afraid, asking her to pray for him. A year later, believing her far above him in wealth after she inherits Staningley, Gilbert visits her; she offers him a Christmas rose, and they marry. The book appeared in June 1848 under the pseudonym Acton Bell, sold rapidly, and went into a second edition within weeks, to which Anne Brontë added a Preface defending her purpose. The library text, from the 1920 John Murray edition, includes that Preface and an introduction by Mrs. Humphry Ward.

Plot or Argument

• Author's Preface and the Ward introduction

  Anne Brontë's Preface to the second edition answers reviewers who found the book coarse: she wished to tell the truth, holds that vice should be shown as it really is, and maintains that a good book is good whatever the sex of its author. Mrs. Humphry Ward's introduction to the 1920 edition precedes it.

• Chapters I–VII: The new tenant

  Gilbert Markham meets Mrs. Graham at church and at her house, quarrels with her over her refusal to let her son learn by exposure to wine and vice, and grows close to her on walks and an excursion to the sea cliffs, while his family and the Millwards watch suspiciously.

• Chapters VIII–XV: Rumor, jealousy and the diary

  Village talk connects Helen with Mr. Lawrence. Gilbert, seeing them together, turns against her, strikes Lawrence from his horse, and finally confronts Helen, who hands him the manuscript of her diary to read.

• Chapters XVI–XXII: Courtship and warning

  In 1821 the eighteen-year-old Helen comes out in society, refuses the suitors her aunt prefers, and chooses Arthur Huntingdon. Her aunt warns her of his character and of the eternal stakes; Helen answers that she hopes for his reform and for the final salvation of all.

• Chapters XXIII–XXXIII: Marriage at Grassdale

  Huntingdon's affection proves shallow. He leaves for long seasons in London, returns broken by dissipation, and fills Grassdale with drinking companions; Lowborough struggles against drink and laudanum, and Helen discovers her husband's affair with Lowborough's wife Annabella.

• Chapters XXXIV–XLIV: The son and the escape

  Helen lives apart from her husband under the same roof for her son's sake, refuses Hargrave, and gives young Arthur a disgust for wine. Huntingdon reads her diary, burns her paints and takes her money, but with Rachel and her brother's help she flees with the child to Wildfell Hall.

• Chapters XLV–XLIX: Return to the frame and Huntingdon's death

  Gilbert, ashamed of his suspicions, makes peace with Lawrence. Helen leaves Wildfell to nurse her husband after his hunting fall; through her letters to her brother, Gilbert learns of the doctor's warnings, Huntingdon's relapse into drink, the onset of mortification, and his fearful death.

• Chapters L–LIII: The Christmas rose

  Gilbert hesitates, aware that the widowed Helen now has wealth and rank beyond his. He travels to Staningley at last, where she gives him a Christmas rose that has bloomed through the snow, and they are married; Gilbert closes his letters from his settled home.

Characters

• Helen Graham (Helen Huntingdon), protagonist and diarist

  Devout, independent young wife who marries Arthur Huntingdon hoping to reform him and later flees with her son to Wildfell Hall.

• Gilbert Markham, narrator

  Young gentleman farmer whose letters frame the story and who comes to love Helen.

• Arthur Huntingdon, husband

  Handsome, witty, self-indulgent gentleman whose drinking and infidelity ruin the marriage and his health.

• Arthur (little Arthur), son

  Helen's young son, whose upbringing she fights to protect.

• Frederick Lawrence, brother and landlord

  Helen's reserved brother and owner of Wildfell Hall, mistaken by Gilbert for a rival.

• Lord Lowborough, friend of Huntingdon

  Melancholy gambler who fights to give up drink and laudanum and is betrayed by his wife.

• Annabella, Lady Lowborough, rival

  Lively, worldly wife of Lord Lowborough who carries on an affair with Huntingdon.

• Walter Hargrave, suitor

  Huntingdon's friend who presses his attentions on Helen.

• Ralph Hattersley, friend of Huntingdon

  Boisterous drinker married to the gentle Milicent, who eventually reforms.

• Mrs. Maxwell, aunt

  Helen's strict, pious aunt at Staningley who warns her against Huntingdon.

• Rachel, servant

  Helen's faithful old nurse who shares her flight.

• Eliza Millward, gossip

  The vicar's younger daughter, once admired by Gilbert, who spreads rumors about Mrs. Graham.

Lessons

• Marrying to reform

  Helen marries Huntingdon believing her love and goodness will change him, against her aunt's warnings. The diary traces how that hope fails and why: he has no wish to change, and she cannot choose for him. The novel treats judgment of character before marriage as a moral duty, not mere caution.

  • What warnings does Helen's aunt give, and why does Helen set them aside?
  • At what point in the diary does Helen understand that she cannot reform her husband?
  • Is hope for another person's change a virtue, a risk, or both?

• Protecting a child's conscience

  Helen's argument with the Markhams in Chapter III and her conduct at Grassdale show her conviction that children should be guarded from vice and armed with principle rather than left to learn by bad experience. Her flight is above all an act of protection for her son.

  • Why does Helen think a boy should be taught the same virtue as a girl?
  • What does Huntingdon teach young Arthur, and why does that decide Helen to leave?
  • Was Helen's method of making her son dislike wine wise?

• Faith under trial

  Helen prays through years of misery, refuses Hargrave because of her vows, and returns to nurse the husband who wronged her. Her steadfastness is not passive; she acts, flees, works and, at the last, urges him to repent. The book presents faith as endurance joined to action.

  • Why does Helen go back to Grassdale when Huntingdon is injured?
  • What does Helen tell her dying husband about who can plead for him?

• Rumor and rash judgment

  Gilbert and the village condemn Mrs. Graham on appearances, and Gilbert's jealousy leads him to strike her brother. The frame story shows the harm of judging before knowing the whole story, which only the diary can supply.

  • How does the village explain Mrs. Graham's behavior before the diary?
  • What does Gilbert learn about himself from reading it?

Context

The story is set between 1821 and 1828, with the frame written in 1847. In the England of the 1820s a married woman's property belonged to her husband and he had the legal right to the custody of their children, so a wife who left with her child had no protection in law; this is why Helen hides under an assumed name. The novel also belongs to the period's temperance debates and to the Evangelical seriousness of the Brontës' clerical household. Helen's hope that all souls will at last be saved, which she defends from Scripture against her aunt in Chapter XX, was a minority view among English Protestants of the time.

Composition

Anne Brontë wrote the novel at Haworth in 1846–1847, after leaving her post as governess at Thorp Green. Thomas Cautley Newby published it in three volumes in June 1848 under the name Acton Bell, and a second edition with her Preface followed in August. After Anne's death in 1849 Charlotte Brontë did not allow it to be reissued in her lifetime, judging its subject a mistake for her sister, and later editions often cut the text. Many critics have linked Huntingdon's decline to that of the Brontës' brother Branwell, though Anne in her Preface called the case extreme and not typical. The library text follows the 1920 John Murray edition, which restores the original chapter titles in its contents list.

Reception

The book sold quickly, outpacing Wuthering Heights, and reviewers were divided, with several objecting to its frank scenes of drunkenness and cruelty. For much of the following century it was overshadowed by Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Since the later 20th century it has been widely reprinted and studied, valued for its realism about drink and marriage, its religious seriousness, and Helen's choice to leave her husband; critics differ over how far it should be read as a social argument and how far as a religious novel.

Comparisons

• jane-eyre

  Charlotte Brontë's Jane refuses to stay with Rochester while his wife lives, and Helen leaves Huntingdon to protect her son; both heroines act on conscience against a man they once loved, and both books end in a marriage of equals after trial.

• wuthering-heights

  Emily Brontë's novel also nests one narrative inside another and shows a household degraded by drink and violence in Hindley Earnshaw, but where Wuthering Heights leaves judgment open, Anne's narrator and diarist judge clearly by Christian standards.

• villette

  Charlotte Brontë's Lucy Snowe, like Helen, supports herself by her own work and keeps a guarded inner life under scrutiny, and both novels test Protestant faith by long solitude and disappointment.

• middlemarch

  Dorothea Brooke, like Helen, marries in idealistic hope and discovers her mistake; Eliot follows the inner experience of an unhappy marriage, Brontë its outward cruelties and the question of leaving.

• the-woman-in-white

  Collins's sensation novel of 1859–60 also turns on a wife's legal powerlessness, as Sir Percival Glyde seeks to control Laura Fairlie's fortune, and uses diaries and documents to reveal what the husband conceals.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The structure: Gilbert's letters to Jack Halford enclose Helen's diary, which in turn is followed by her letters to her brother.
• The tea-table argument in Chapter III about how to bring up boys and girls.
• Helen's debate with her aunt in Chapter XX about Huntingdon and about final salvation.
• The moment Huntingdon reads Helen's diary and burns her paints, which forces her decision to flee.
• The Christmas rose in the last chapter, and what it says about Helen.

Key terms and names

Wildfell Hall

The half-ruined Elizabethan house owned by Frederick Lawrence where Helen hides under the name Mrs. Graham.

Grassdale Manor

Huntingdon's country house, where Helen's married life and its miseries unfold.

Staningley

The home of Helen's aunt and uncle, where her courtship begins and which she later inherits.

Frame narrative

A story set inside another story; Gilbert's letters frame Helen's diary.

Acton Bell

The pen name under which Anne Brontë published her novels.

Tartar-emetic

A medicine that causes nausea, which Helen secretly adds to her son's wine to make him dislike drink.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension Why does Gilbert believe Mrs. Graham is in love with Mr. Lawrence, and what does he do about it?
2. Comprehension What warnings does Helen receive before she marries Arthur Huntingdon?
3. Comprehension Why does Helen finally leave Grassdale, and who helps her?
4. Interpretation Why does Anne Brontë let Helen tell her own story in a diary rather than having Gilbert summarize it?
5. Interpretation How do Hattersley and Lowborough serve as contrasts to Huntingdon?
6. Interpretation Why does Helen return to nurse her husband, and what does her conduct at his deathbed show?
7. Big Question When is it right to leave a home or a promise, and when must one stay?
8. Big Question Can one person's love save another who does not wish to be saved?

Faith Connections

• 2 Corinthians 6:14 (Scripture)

  Be ye not unequally yoked: Helen's aunt warns her against marrying a man indifferent to faith, and the diary shows the consequences of ignoring that counsel.

• Psalm 49:7 (Scripture)

  Helen quotes this verse to her dying husband: no man can redeem his brother, so Huntingdon must look to Christ rather than to her.

• 1 Corinthians 3:15 (Scripture)

  Helen cites the man saved yet so as by fire in Chapter XX to defend her hope of final salvation; her aunt answers with warnings of judgment, and the debate is worth weighing on its own terms.

• Augustine, Confessions VIII (Great Conversation)

  Augustine's account of being bound by habit and unable to will a change he partly desires sheds light on Lowborough's and Huntingdon's struggles with drink.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Vice shown truthfully warns better than vice concealed; a marriage founded on charm without principle cannot be redeemed by one partner's goodness alone; yet faith, work and courage can carry a wronged person through and even bring her to show mercy.

Rhetorical device: embedded narrative. Gilbert hands the reader Helen's own diary from Chapter XVI to Chapter XLIV, so her account answers in her own words the rumors the frame story has repeated.

Debate: Resolved: that Helen was right to leave her husband and take her son.

Memory Work

I wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it.

I do pray for you, every hour and every minute, Arthur; but you must pray for yourself.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Explain how Helen's faith shapes three decisions in the novel: her marriage, her flight, and her return to Grassdale.

Comparison with Jane Eyre: Jane Eyre leaves Thornfield and Helen leaves Grassdale. Compare their reasons, their means of supporting themselves, and the role faith plays in each decision.

Medical Lens

The novel is one of the most detailed portraits of habitual drunkenness in early Victorian fiction, written before alcoholism had a medical name (the term was introduced by the Swedish physician Magnus Huss in 1849). Huntingdon's decline is traced through his diary-recorded absences, his returns in shattered health, his irritability and tremor, and at last the fatal course of an injury that, as the doctor tells Helen, would have been trifling to a temperate man. The doctor orders bleeding, forbids stimulants, and later finds that mortification has set in. Lord Lowborough's struggle is a separate study: he forswears drink, relapses, and is described as carrying a private bottle of laudanum, abstaining one day and exceeding the next. Most striking for a modern reader is Helen's method with her son in Chapter XLI: she adds tartar-emetic, an antimony compound used as an emetic, to his wine so that liquor becomes linked with nausea, explicitly enlisting the powers of association. This anticipates the aversion treatments for alcohol dependence tried in the 20th century, though it is a mother's improvised discipline, not a medical procedure. Helen also fears that her son may inherit a taste for drink from both his father and her own. Readers may be tempted to give Huntingdon a modern diagnosis; the novel itself frames his condition in moral and religious terms, and any clinical reading is an interpretation.

• Chapter IV

  At the Markhams' tea party Lawrence defends Helen's plan of teaching her son to loathe wine, comparing it to the general wisdom of abstaining from laudanum.

  Alcohol Opium Laudanum
• Chapter XXII

  Huntingdon tells Helen how Lowborough forswore drink but kept a private bottle of laudanum, then relapsed into spirits at the club.

  Addiction Opium Laudanum Alcohol Melancholia Depression
• Chapters XXIX–XXXI

  Huntingdon returns from London seasons worn out and irritable, and the gatherings at Grassdale descend into drunken scenes that Helen records.

  Alcohol Addiction
• Chapter XLI

  Helen describes giving her son wine dosed with tartar-emetic until he is disgusted by every kind of liquor, and her fear that he may inherit the taste.

  Alcohol Pharmacology Poisons Heredity Degeneration
• Chapters XLVII–XLIX

  Helen's letters report Huntingdon's hunting injury, his half-delirium and thirst, the doctor's order to bleed him, his relapse into wine, the onset of mortification, and his death.

  Physicians Doctors Bloodletting Fever Infection Death Dying Alcohol

Creative Prompts

• Essay

  Compare Helen's argument about educating boys and girls in Chapter III with the way she actually raises her son at Grassdale. Is she consistent?

• Dialogue

  Write the conversation between Helen and her aunt the morning after Helen accepts Huntingdon, giving each woman her strongest reasons.

• Fiction

  Write a short letter from Frederick Lawrence to Gilbert Markham explaining why he kept his relationship to Mrs. Graham secret.

• Classroom

  Map the novel's nested narratives: Gilbert's letters to Halford, Helen's diary, and Helen's letters to her brother. Discuss what each layer lets the reader know and hides.

Further Reading

• Agnes Grey, Anne Brontë

  Anne Brontë's first novel, drawn from her years as a governess.

• The Brontës, Juliet Barker

• In Search of Anne Brontë, Edward Chitham

• The Life of Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell

  The 1857 biography that shaped the family's early reputation.