From AudioFile
Helen Graham has taken up residence in the bleak Wildfell Hall with her young son to escape her alcoholic and philandering husband. The story is narrated both by Helen and the man who falls in love with her. Frederick Davidson and Nadia May take the roles of the storytellers, and they do an excellent job of portraying both the male and female voices. May reads Helen's diary and correspondence. May's voice is young, fresh and naive, well-suited to Helen as a young woman; the voices of the men are excellent as well. Her laughter sounds genuine, and her portrayal of drunken men is perfect. She moves the narrative along crisply, with just the right touch of drama. Davidson's voicing is also excellent, but he tends to overdramatize at times, and his tempo is just a shade too fast. The choice to use both male and female narrators was a good one, enlivening the story and underlining the differences between the sexes in Victorian England. S.S.R. (c) AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Erica Bauermeister
Of the three Bronte sisters, Emily and Charlotte are better known, yet it is Anne's work which carries some of the strongest feminist themes. In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall a devout young woman named Helen falls in love with a man who is handsome, but whose values are questionable; willing to believe she can alter his character, she marries him. Her marriage becomes a misery she has no power to change until she devises a bold plan to take control. Her story comes through two voices - her own and that of Gilbert Markham, a man who falls in love with Helen later in her life - and is told through journals and letters written over a period of time. Because of the privacy and immediacy of these narratives, the reader sees personal changes and attitudes Helen and Gilbert are often unaware of at the time: we witness Helen's first naive protestations of passion for her husband and follow her through her eventual disillusionment; we recognize Gilbert's early, unconscious egotism. While the plot continues and mysteries are unraveled, what Helen and Gilbert say - as well as what they don't say - provides another story to follow, which reinforces Anne Bronte's indictment of the sexual double standards of nineteenth-century Britain. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14.


Book Description
Anne Bronte's second novel is a passionate and courageous challenge to the conventions supposedly upheld by Victorian society and reflected in circulating-library fiction. The heroine, Helen Huntingdon, after a short period of initial happiness, leaves her dissolute husband, and must earn her own living to rescue her son from his influence. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is compelling in its imaginative power, the realism and range of its dialogue, and its psychological insight into the characters involved in a marital battle.


Download Description
It is autumn of 1827 when a woman named Helen Graham moves into the deserted, stately moorland manor Wildfell Hall with her young son. The neighbors take immediate notice of this awkward circumstance, and she is subjected to their jealousy and the idle rumor they spread. They discover she is escaping a brutish marriage and has taken an assumed name to prevent her husband finding her. She must unchain herself and her son physically and emotionally from his roguish influence and earn a living. The imaginative power and realism of these characters involved in marital hostilities urge the reader to view the far-reaching aspects of their struggle with a more compassionate understanding. The husband she left, Arthur Huntingdon, was a selfish womanizer who only wanted to satiate his own desires. Even though Helen offered to help him turn his life around, he had no wish to give up his drunkenness or adultery. At last Helen grew to despise him as much as she once loved him. But when she witnessed his attempts to make his son a chip off the old block, her motherly duties overrode her responsibilities as a wife, and with the help of her brother she runs away to the obscurity of a small town. Here she meets Gilbert Markham who falls in love with her and requests her hand in marriage. She refuses him and offers an explanation by supplying him with references to her journals and letters that will eventually convince him of the desperation of her married life. As the plot advances and mysteries unwind, what Gilbert and Helen say--and also what they don't say--gives the reader access to Bronte's scourging accusation of the sexual ambiguities of 19th century Britain. And even though they are often unaware of their insensitive reactions to their own beliefs, they realize they love each other. When Arthur Huntingdon dies, they are finally allowed to marry.


The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
Novel by Anne Bronte (writing under the pseudonym Acton Bell), first published in three volumes in 1848. This epistolary novel presents a portrait of debauchery that is remarkable in light of the author's sheltered life. It is the story of young Helen Graham's disastrous marriage to the dashing drunkard Arthur Huntingdon--said to be modeled on the author's wayward brother Branwell--and her flight from him to the seclusion of Wildfell Hall. Pursued by Gilbert Markham, who is in love with her, Graham refuses him and, by way of explanation, gives him her journal. There he reads of her wretched married life. Eventually, after Huntingdon's death, they marry.

ANNOTATION

Bronte's second novel is a passionate and courageous challenge to the conventions supposedly upheld by Victorian society. The heroine leaves her dissolute husband and must earn her own living to rescue her son from his influence. An Oxford University Press World Classic.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Compelling in its imaginative power and bold naturalism, the novel opens in the autumn of 1812, when a mysterious woman who calls herself Helen Graham seeks refuge at the desolate moorland mansion of Wildfell Hall. Bronte's enigmatic heroine becomes the object of gossip and jealousy as neighbors learn she is escaping from an abusive marriage and living under an assumed name. A daring story that exposed the dark brutality of Victorian chauvinism, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was nevertheless attacked by some critics as a celebration of the same excesses it criticized. This edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is the companion volume to the Mobil Masterpiece Theatre WGBH television presentation broadcast on PBS.

SYNOPSIS

ver a short period in the 1840s, the three Bront￯﾿ﾽ sisters working in a remote English parsonage produced some of the best-loved and most-enduring of all novels: Charlotte's Jane Eyre, Emily's Wuthering Heights, and Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a book that created a scandal when it was published in 1884 under the pseudon

FROM THE CRITICS

AudioFile - Paul E. Ferrari