Where is the tenant of wildfell hall set

I couldn't stand Wuthering Heights , accomplished though it was, and I think lots of people tend to assume I must be something of a Jane Eyre devotee: I'm not. I'm really not. The next time someone asks me which I prefer, I shall tell them: Helen Huntingdon. Emphatically, enthusiastically, and with the fire of a thousand suns.

Helen Huntingdon don't need no man. She's had enough of your friendzoning bullshit. Helen Huntingdon will tell you precisely what she thinks of you, with documentary supporting evidence from your wife, and then she will close the library door and make good art, which you are not allowed to see. Helen Huntingdon is a force of nature, and and she has a happily-ever-after to manufacture for herself.

She might not know exactly what it'll look like, but it'll be hers. This book The framing narrative is boring compared to the meat of the story, and the meat of the story is told in diary form. It doesn't really work. Do I care? Not in the slightest. For the first sixty or so pages, we join Whiner of the Month Gilbert Markham, who discovers that there's a new lady living at the house out of town - it's Wildfell Hall, she's the tenant, are you with me?

New Lady isn't interested. What follows is Helen Huntingdon's diary through the first seven years of her marriage to a heinous bastard, from when they first meet, to when she leaves him. She doesn't say there are good times. She doesn't suggest that Arthur Huntingdon might be alright, really, deep down.

She doesn't even make him a monster. You'll recognise him; I certainly do. He's of a kind with Rochester, with Heathcliff, with a hundred men inspired by them Edward Fairfax Rochester: the thinking woman's abusive romantic hero.

He doesn't just love you. Nobody's different. This is what it's always going to be like. I read this for a book group, and we noted that Helen Huntingdon does what Isabella Linton does in Wuthering Heights : she marries young and idealistically, thinking she can change a man who obviously strings her along. She does her best, for as long as she can, and then she takes her son and runs.

We're not really meant to like Isabella - she's young, she's foolish, we're sort of supposed to think she should have known better - but you know, I was with her all along, and I'm still with her. Luckily for us, Helen Huntingdon is a complete badass.

She sticks around, she puts up with a lot, but she doesn't do it quietly. She doesn't lie down and take anything. There is a core of her that remains there, but it's not hidden away under layers of thick skin.

It's right out in the open, and staring pointedly. And when it gets too much, she takes her son, and she leaves. And she supports herself. And she does difficult things, and they hurt, and she does them, and she grows as a character and as a woman and I mean that as opposed to girl, rather than as opposed to man.

Such character growth. I love it. She's portrayed positively, which is why she's different from Isabella Linton, why she's fascinating and important and my hero, and why you've not read this book. Anne, and Helen, were too far ahead of their time. It fell out of the public eye. In the s, I gather, noticing that marriage wasn't always perfect came back into fashion, and the book had something of a resurgence.

Frankly, it deserves a bigger one. In the author's foreword, she says that she was trying to write something true. The characters act in ways that are true. They say things, and respond to things, in ways that are true. They escape, finally, or don't, in ways that are true. I think you should read it.

Seriously, you can borrow my copy. View all 7 comments. This was a beautiful love story with one of the most interesting narrative styles I've ever encountered. Without saying too much, the narration of this story shifts, and the overall style is not your typical narration style of a novel. Does this make sense? I did see some ressemblances between this book and "Wuthering Heights", and I liked it.

As a matter of fact, I think I like "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" just a little bit more, because to me it read more easily and had a beautiful storyline. The characters of this book come with a heavy background, and it's the gradual revelation of this background that makes the story so interesting. The middle part dragged on a bit too long for my taste, and I started questioning one of the characters' behaviour and lack of decision-making yes, I just made that a word!

I really enjoyed this! We stan a feminist icon! TW: abusive relationships. View 1 comment. I really loved so much this book, it was not an easy reading for me, it went very slow in some parts The characters were very peculiar and interesting, had to concentrate a lot because there are maybe fifty different secondary of them Helen Graham and her unlucky marriage is the the pivot of the story, every sad parts work to build up a deep change in many people we will meet.

Gilbert, Helen, Frederick and Annabella Every one of them will receive a final destiny in the story that will be a cared blessing or a curse for each souls. Jul 15, Marieke rated it really liked it Shelves: , classics , feminism , united-kingdom , e-book , gossip-girls , soap-operas-for-the-cerebral-set , books-i-never-read-but-shoulda , bookish , nook. That was a rather long letter, eh? Clearly, I had a good time. Yes, I am a generous hoe. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is one of the most boring pieces of literature I ever had the displeasure of reading: it took me nine months to finish it.

Its cause will be revealed to the reader later. The first few chapters were definitely the strongest. Gilbert was super intrusive and Helen was having none of his shit. I applaud that. Let your eyes be blind to all external attractions, your ears deaf to all the fascinations of flattery and light discourse.

How badly she wanted to make a point is most clearly seen in the fact that almost all of her characters are painted in a black and white fashion. Apart from that, I also hated the plot device of having a story within a story within a story within a story … I wish I was kidding.

And every single diary entry, letter and normal dialogue and prose sounded the exact fucking same. I am so mad. I did not sign up for this shit, as Anne was clearly a talented writer, why did she have to make everything so bland and same-sounding?

I cry. When she went back to Huntingdon as he lay dying I rolled my eyes so hard I saw the back of my head. Calm the fuck down. I get it. I agree with it. The way it was executed in the text was beyond messy and just pissed me off. I adore my darling child Emily very dearly, but both her sisters left me thoroughly disappointed.

Charlotte still takes the cake tho, Tenant is a masterpiece compared to Jane Eyre. View all 19 comments. After posting my review, a number of GR friends said I should read this novel, and that I might like it more than her first work. And they were right.

Newby, London a solid 3 stars. I am glad I saved reading the Introduction for last because, although quite interesting, it gave away too much information about what happened in the book. I tend to do that nowadays with those novels that have Introductions — read them after reading the novel.

I much prefer the latter. Hargreaves Hargreaves had a number of footnotes in the text, which could be found at the back of the book. It was really interesting…he had to decide whether to change wording or grammar that was peculiar to that day and age. He explained his decisions. Trivial I know but imagine having to make such decisions as an editor in which how the reader interprets a passage can be altered in subtle ways by such decisions.

Frederick Lawrence. Helen stays at Wildfell Hall with little Arthur and paints landscapes, and that is the way she earns her living. She is constantly rejecting him while subtly leading him on, and finally she gives him a huge sheaf of papers and tells him to read it and get back them back to her when he is done.

The sheaf is a bunch of letters written as a diary I guess and so the novel is a story-within-a-story. Once he is done takes up a good deal of the novel he returns them to her, and the novel takes off from where it left. Each of the 53 chapters are titled. I found some of the writing tedious some sentences took up one-third of a page and there was a good deal of religiosity to boot. But in general, the novel held my interest.

But this was written circa , so I should feel some pity for Helen and give Gilbert a break because that is how British gentlemen acted in those days no pity for Arthur. Anne Bronte had quite a vocabulary! Word I had to look up: ebullition the action of bubbling or boiling. It is sad that Anne Bronte died at such an early age 29 of tuberculosis.

View all 15 comments. Jun 25, Paul rated it really liked it Shelves: readingwomenchallenge. The plot is pretty straightforward. Gilbert Markham is a gentleman farmer and the story is set as a series of letters to his friend. A mysterious woman Helen Graham, an assumed name and her young son move into Wildfell Hall, a local and somewhat rundown property.

She is rather reclusive and begins to be the subject of local gossip. Over time she mixes with some of her neighbour and Gilbert falls in love with he 4. Over time she mixes with some of her neighbour and Gilbert falls in love with her. Helen does her best not to encourage him, but he befriends her son and praises her art, which is important to her. One evening he sees Helen being friendly towards a neighbour and friend of his. He confronts her and she gives him her diary and tells him to go away and read it.

Gilbert also attacks and injures the neighbour. The diary takes up a large portion of the book and is narrated by Helen. Helen then goes off to nurse her husband who is now very ill because of his dissolute lifestyle. Eventually Arthur does the decent thing and dies. Then the question is do Gilbert and Helen finally get it together. The reader already knows the answer of course. A fairly straightforward plot, executed well.

It has been described as one of the earliest feminist novels. When Helen discovers that Arthur is having an affair she makes a clear decision to end their marital intimacy, saying to him that she would remain a wife in name only. Unlike her two sisters Anne Bronte did not glamourize violent and alcoholic men and she was the one that spent the most time nursing Branwell. All of the sisters used Branwell as a model, Anne did not endow Arthur Huntingdon with any glamour, and he is painted plainly as a charming abuser.

Helen is made to challenge a lot of legal and social conventions relating to marriage, motherhood, living alone and relating to men. There are some irritations as well. Helen is piously religious as well and will insist on going on about it. Gilbert spends most of the time whining and complaining, apart from beating up someone he sees as a rival. There is a complexity to it and articles and texts analysing it are abundant.

Look, Gilbert, it is still fresh and blooming as a flower can be, with the cold snow even now on its petals. View all 12 comments. May 03, Sarah rated it really liked it.

Poor Helen. Poor Anne. Poor book Her voice, in many ways, completes the harmony and picks up where the two of them leave off. True, there are no fires, ghosts, or windswept moors. But, as one critic noted, "The slamming of Helen's bedroom door against her husband reverberated throughout Victorian England.

It's difficult for me to separate the author from her time. This book suffers from the usual problems inherent to the period. The story is, by necessity, a little drawn out. There's the contrived excuse for narration, superfluous to contemporary readers, etc. The story, however, is evenly written and the characterization is stunningly deep. I admit, I initially found Helen a little too rigid, too cold, and perhaps emotionally dependent on her son.

I came to understand her and her choices. Yes, a pious Helen is not especially worldly. She's not especially brazen. Yet there's courage in that quiet demeanor. There's a still, small voice that refuses to waver. It's true, her beliefs aren't my beliefs. But I admire her fortitude.

I'm touched by her steadfast devotion. She stood firm in her own convictions, even as her swaggering husband laughed at them. Helen was warned about Arthur yet married him anyway. She did the best she could. She tried with all her heart. Sometimes that's all you can do. To paraphrase from another book, If I knew then what I know now We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from.

To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall , out now in a new edition from the Folio Society , tells the story of Helen Huntingdon and her ill-fated marriage to an abusive alcoholic. Despite critical ambivalence, on its first publication, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was a bestseller to rival Jane Eyre. After Charlotte died in , publishers began reprinting Tenant , but this time in a version riddled with errors and omissions, with entire chapters stripped away to keep the page count down.

But Anne appears most regularly in popular culture as a foil to her more famous sisters : the weird one, the forgotten one.

Because The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a wildly modern, daring, and provocative book. A mysterious young widow who calls herself Helen Graham has moved into an empty gothic manor with her young son, and while the neighborhood fears that she may be a witch, Gilbert Markham, our narrator, rapidly becomes infatuated with her. Helen is easy to fall in love with, not because she is likable, but because she is angry.

But for reasons that I must admit remain wholly mysterious to me, Helen has no such aversion to the vapid and self-absorbed Gilbert, and in fact grows to care for him deeply. She gives him her diary to read, and we the readers are allowed to read it too.

She has broken the law and fled from her still-living husband, taking her child with her, and now she is living in hiding under an assumed name, penniless and earning her own living as an artist, guarding against the day that her husband finds her and takes her away again. Sadly, Gilbert returns as our narrator after he finishes reading it. In an intimate present-tense narrative, we see her fall in love with charming, handsome, flighty Arthur Huntingdon, who woos the over-serious Helen by his willingness to laugh at everything, including her.

Why a Booktrail? Share this:. What you need to know before your trail Helen Huntingdon is the mysterious tenant of Wildfell Hall. She also worked at Thorpe Green although neither of these houses fully ressemble the Manor in the books Linden-Car is the village that Wildfell Hall is close to and this is of course in Yorkshire. Characters The character Arthur Huntington is thought to be based on her brother Branwell Bronte who was also a heavy drinker.

Streetview Maps Bronte country - Haworth high street. Bronte country - Haworth high street. She marries him, fatally confident that her love will reform him. For a time all goes well, but gradually he resumes his drinking and womanising, and Helen becomes increasingly unhappy.

A son is born, but her husband's debaucheries become more frequent and more organised. When he begins to corrupt his son into his own 'manly' habits she decides to flee, and after an aborted attempt, sadistically thwarted by her husband, she finally achieves her aim, fleeing to Wildfell Hall, in the vicinity of her brother, who is Frederick Lawrence.

When Arthur is on his death-bed, Helen returns to him and watches helplessly as he dies unrepentant.