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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• Chapter XXII

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

• Chapters XXIX–XXXI

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

• 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.

• 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.