The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

  • Author Anne Brontë
  • Narrator Alex Jennings, Jenny Agutter
  • Publisher Blackstone Publishing
  • Run Time 16 hours and 25 minutes
  • Format Audio
  • Genre Classic fiction.
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What to expect

Helen Huntingdon flees a disastrous marriage and retreats to the desolate, half-ruined moorland mansion, Wildfell Hall. With her small son, Arthur, she adopts an assumed name and makes her living as a painter. The inconvenience of the house is outweighed by the fact that she and Arthur are removed from her drunken, degenerate husband.

Although the house is isolated, she seeks to avoid the attentions of the neighbors. However, it is difficult to do so. All too soon she becomes an object of speculation, then cruel gossip.

Narrated by her neighbor Gilbert Markham, and from the pages of her own diary, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall portrays Helen's struggle for independence in a time when law and society defined a married woman as her husband's property.

Critics Review

  • “Alex Jennings, who reads Markham’s letters, gives us a strong sense of the youth’s energy and frustration, while Jenny Agutter, who reads Helen’s journal, never loses sight of the powerful heroine’s threatened dignity and immense personal control. Both of these accomplished actors combine to create a moving and eloquent narration.”

    AudioFile
  • “The novel is vast but primarily tells the story of Helen, whose husband is abusive and dissipated…The book’s most shocking moments are the ones which depict Arthur’s abusive attempts to get the young child drunk, seemingly to spite and hurt his wife, and it’s clear from the narrative that Brontë had a lot of first-hand experience in dealing with and subduing drunk men…The book was neglected for a really long time. Today it is widely considered to be a landmark in early feminist literature, but its frank depictions of addiction within marriage are just as deserving of acclaim.”

    New York Times
  • “Of the three Brontë sisters, Emily and Charlotte are better known, yet it is Anne’s work which carries some of the strongest…themes…While the plot continues and mysteries are unraveled, what Helen and Gilber say…reinforces Anne Brontë’s indictment of the sexual double standards of nineteenth-century Britain.”

    Erica Bauermeister, 500 Great Books by Women
  • The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was conceived in the same atmosphere as
    Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Wildfell Hall has power and
    imagination, and is so close to one of the tragedies in the sisters’ own
    lives, that no perceptive reader can be indifferent to it.”

    Margaret Lane, Brontë scholar

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