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#the tenant of wildfell hall
shakespear-esque · 2 days
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(...) Cupid's arrows not only had been too sharp for me, but they were barbed and deeply rooted, and I had not yet been able to wrench them from my heart.
By Anne Brontë, from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
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People are so boring about classic literature sometimes. Like I know it’s cool to be critical of men in books from the 19th century or whatever but it just leads to ripping out all of the nuance in favor of “Uh all of the Brontë men were evil and abusive and that’s all there is to those characters.” Say something interesting. I’m begging you
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bethanydelleman · 4 months
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My very specific narrative catnip is stepparents who love their stepchildren with their whole hearts and stepchildren who consider their stepparent to be superior to their deadbeat biological parent and who tell them that out loud. And this doesn't have anything to do with my childhood AT ALL.
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burningvelvet · 5 months
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In a letter to W. S. Williams (14 August 1848), Charlotte Brontë compares Jane Eyre’s Rochester to the Byronic heroes of her sisters’ novels, Heathcliff from Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Huntingdon from Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall:
“You say Mr. Huntingdon reminds you of Mr. Rochester. Does he? Yet there is no likeness between the two; the foundation of each character is entirely different. Huntingdon is a specimen of the naturally selfish, sensual, superficial man, whose one merit of a joyous temperament only avails him while he is young and healthy, whose best days are his earliest, who never profits by experience, who is sure to grow worse the older he grows.
Mr. Rochester has a thoughtful nature and a very feeling heart; he is neither selfish nor self-indulgent; he is ill-educated, misguided; errs, when he does err, through rashness and inexperience: he lives for a time as too many other men live, but being radically better than most men, he does not like that degraded life, and is never happy in it. He is taught the severe lessons of experience and has sense to learn wisdom from them. Years improve him; the effervescence of youth foamed away, what is really good in him still remains. His nature is like wine of a good vintage, time cannot sour, but only mellows him. Such at least was the character I meant to portray.
Heathcliffe, again, of Wuthering Heights is quite another creation. He exemplifies the effects which a life of continued injustice and hard usage may produce on a naturally perverse, vindictive, and inexorable disposition. Carefully trained and kindly treated, the black gipsy-cub might possibly have been reared into a human being, but tyranny and ignorance made of him a mere demon. The worst of it is, some of his spirit seems breathed through the whole narrative in which he figures: it haunts every moor and glen, and beckons in every fir-tree of the Heights.”
Source: The Brontës Life and Letters (Clement King Shorter, 2013)
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the-fairy-thing · 1 year
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petaltexturedskies · 5 months
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He knows he is my sun, but when he chooses to withhold his light, he would have my sky to be all darkness; he cannot bear that I should have a moon to mitigate the deprivation.
Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
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wildfellweekly · 9 months
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New Book Club for Autumn 2023!
Announcing Wildfell Weekly, a substack read-a-long for Anne Brontë's novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall!
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You must go back with me to the autumn of 1827.
A new tenant has taken up residence in old Wildfell Hall and Mr. Gilbert Markham finds himself very intrigued. But the widow Mrs. Helen Graham is more than what she seems, and as rumors about her start to fly, she reveals to a doubting Gilbert the truth about the disastrous marriage she left behind.
Anne Brontë differed from her sisters Charlotte (Jane Eyre) and Emily (Wuthering Heights) in favoring a Realist rather than Romantic approach to her writing. In Tenant she explored themes of domestic violence, alcoholism and addiction, gender relations, motherhood and marriage, and the ability of women to define their own lives with an unflinching desire to depict what she saw to be true. While now considered among the first feminist novels, critics of Anne's day were shocked by a book they found coarse, brutal, and overly graphic.
So starting October 26, 2023 and until June 10, 2024, let's read together a story one nineteenth century critic called "utterly unfit to be put in the hands of girls"!
Find More Information about the Project and Subscribe Here!
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red-umbrella-811 · 8 months
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“All novels are, or should be, written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man.”
— Anne Brontë
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adobongsiopao · 3 months
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Caricature of Brontē siblings from an old issue of "Punch" magazine.
Source: The Official Bronte Group on Facebook
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prosedumonde · 2 months
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Chez moi, le rire est si proche des larmes ; je pleure souvent lorsque je suis heureuse, et je souris lorsque je suis triste. 
Anne Brontë, Le Manoir de Wildfell Hall (The Tenant of Wildfell Hall)
VO : But smiles and tears are so alike with me; they are neither of them confined to any particular feelings: I often cry when I am happy, and smile when I am sad.
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A'ight, what is it about Anne Brontë and Tenant of Wildfell Hall? I keep seeing stuff about how Anne is the unproblematic Brontë sister and that's what kept me away from her books lol
*kracks knuckles* All right. So, remember how the Brontë sisters wrote three novels simultaneously? Charlotte wrote The Professor, Emily wrote Wuthering Heights, and Anne wrote Agnes Grey. The two latter got picked up by publishers, but The Professor was rejected, so Charlotte finished up Jane Eyre and sent it to a publisher, who accepted it immediately and had it published before Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey got printed. All three of them wrote under pen names (Charlotte was Currer Bell, Anne was Acton Bell, and Emily was Ellis Bell), because they knew their novels were, say, a little controversial, and that if it was known they were women, their characters would be judged and immediately associated to their works. So needless to say, they were VERY supportive of each other, because they knew no one else would. (Their father was also supportive, but they published their novels without telling him at first but once they did, he was very encouraging, thankfully.)
It's easy to see why Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights would be considered controversial in their day (they still kind of are today given the Discourse(tm), lol). Agnes Grey, while it didn't do as well as JE and WH, was criticized for being a little too... let's say, honest about a governess' day-to-day life, when Anne wrote it drawing from her own experiences as a governess. The thing with Anne is that people find her stuff a little moralizing, but it was in her best interest to present Agnes as virtuous given how she made little secret of how poorly governesses could be treated, since it wasn't that rare they'd be accused of profiting from the families they were employed by, when there were abuse cases more often than not.
Then The Tenant of Wildfell Hall came out, and that's when criticism started to fly. May Sinclair (an early 20th century suffragist) would later write that the scene where Helen (the main character of the novel) slams her door to her husband's face had a reveberation that was heard throughout England. It's the story (in case you don't mind getting spoiled for a 150-year-old book) of a lady who marries a Victorian fuckboy called Huntington, ends up in an abusive household where her only comfort is her son, and once she realizes that her husband is becoming a bad influence on her child, she leaves him and manages to hide in a house that her brother is willing to rent to her, while she tries to earn a small living by painting. And people lost their shit, because according to them, Helen was a bad woman for leaving her husband, even though she did it to, you know, get her son out of a toxic environment. If Charlotte criticized anything about the novel, it's that she thought some aspects of Huntington were depicted too graphically, but they mostly had to do with his alcoholism and his adultery (this is important: those critcisms have nothing to do with Helen, or how Tenant is shade thrown at Charlotte and Emily's works). That might have been because Anne got some inspiration for Huntington from Branwell, their brother, who was also an alcoholic and got fired from his job as a tutor for having an affair with the lady of the house. Charlotte was pretty fed up with Branwell at that point, and while Emily was the one who got along with him best, they had some pretty big fights because she was in no way a pushover (so the belief that Charlotte and Emily idolized Branwell while Anne was the only one who saw through his BS is also, incidentally, BS).
So, why did Charlotte stop Tenant from being re-printed after Anne's death? Simply put, the criticism against it was getting worse, and people were defaming Anne's character because of it. Charlotte had had her own share of troubles with Jane Eyre - she dedicated the second edition to William Makepeace Thackeray (of Vanity Fair and Barry Lyndon fame) because he was her favorite author, without knowing his wife was institutionalized after suffering from severe post-partum depression. And that led, of course, to people speculating that Jane Eyre was semi-autobiographical, and that Charlotte was Thackeray's mistress. (I mean, it *is* semi-autobiographical, but Thackeray had nothing to do with it.) So she was understandably a little on edge, and while she edited Agnes Grey for a reprinting after Anne's death (given there were a lot of spelling mistakes and the like in the first printing), she asked for Tenant to not be reprinted to protect her sister's memory.
So no, Charlotte did not block Tenant from being as well-known as Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre because she was "jealous", or because she was mad that Anne was "throwing shade" at her and at Emily. She was protecting her sister's reputation, because she wasn't even alive anymore to speak for herself and mount any kind of defense, and that was while Charlotte's own reputation was under fire, after she had lost the two people who had supported her the most - Emily died in 1848, and Anne in 1849. To try to pit these sisters against each other, when two of them died far too young and the surviving one had to pick up the pieces and defend them against public opinion - it is simply distasteful, and it needs to stop.
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quotation--marks · 4 months
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She was trusted and valued by her father, loved and courted by all dogs, cats, children, and poor people, and slighted and neglected by everybody else. 
Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
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princesssarisa · 4 months
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Sometimes I wish scholars wouldn't speculate about the "hidden motives" and "unspoken emotions" of historical figures. Not that it isn't interesting or in some ways valuable to do so, but then other people read those speculations and take them as fact.
In passing, I just saw a post about the Brontë sisters which stated as fact that Charlotte prevented The Tenant of Wildfell Hall from being republished because she was jealous of Anne.
I'm sorry, but that's pure conjuncture on the part of certain scholars, and I think it's more than a little mean-spirited and sexist too. The obvious reason why Charlotte did what she did was reputation. The book's subject matter was widely considered unseemly, it got negative reviews, and this hurt Anne's reputation after her death – and by extension the rest of the family's too, since once the sisters' identities were known, it couldn't have been hard to trace the book's source of inspiration to Branwell. By apologizing for Tenant in her preface to Wuthering Heights and by preventing it from being republished, Charlotte was smoothing things over and protecting her late sister's reputation as best she could. Maybe it was misguided, maybe from a modern perspective it was "cowardly," and of course it's unfortunate that it kept Tenant from being widely read or appreciated until more recent years. But by all appearances, the motive was public relations.
"She really suppressed it out of petty jealousy because she knew it was better than her own books" is pure speculation, and more than a little mean-spirited, IMHO.
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bethanydelleman · 9 months
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burningvelvet · 2 months
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will never get over the fact that mr. heathcliff and mr. arthur huntington are canonically more attractive than mr. rochester.
aside from the fact that they're both described as being handsome, and mr. rochester is described as being not handsome, we can see this play out in the text. while it's a point that mr. rochester's love interests only want him for his money/status, with arthur and heathcliff that's not entirely the case (you could argue that isabella is partly concerned with heathcliff's newfound wealth, but imo if he wasn't handsome as well, she probably wouldn't bother).
like helen I Love My Bible graham sees arthur and immediately starts drawing and painting him to sublimate her very very obvious attraction that everyone (including him) is aware of. even though she's told he's horrible, she says I CAN FIX HIM!!!! JUST LOOK AT HIM!!! and annabella just openly cheats on her husband with him for years. like helen, isabella linton is told that heathcliff is horrible but she's like BUT HOW CAN THAT BE TRUE WHEN HANDSOME? HAVE YOU SEEN HIM? and as soon as mr. lockwood meets heathcliff in the very beginning he becomes obsessed with him. even after heathcliff lets him be attacked by his vicious dogs, mr. lockwood refuses to leave him alone. not to mention that even the initially biased and usually critical nelly agrees that he's handsome, and cathy literally dying because she regrets not marrying him
— although cathy/heathcliff's bond is much more than skin deep / isn't about looks or regular forms of attraction (bc they have an almost twin-like, spiritual bond) i feel like seeing him healthy and handsome and "glowed up" really hurt cathy 10x more than she was hurt before his return, bc back then she could maybe try to delude herself out of missing him as much by remembering him when he was in his slovenly servant role & embarrassing her infront of the lintons — but seeing proof of his potential & that he always did have it in him to accrue & maintain wealth/education/fashion (and yes, good looks too), & that he could've/would've done so if he'd married her, is really what helped to kill her (aside from... y'know, the whole childbirth thing of course - but the narrative does heavily imply that the drama from heathcliff's return decreased her chances of surviving childbirth, so when i refer to her death, i'm looking at the more internal/emotional causes)
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warrioreowynofrohan · 4 months
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Happy “a man is described as voluptuous” day to anyone who follows both Dracula Daily and Wildfell Weekly!
The bright, blue eyes regarded the spectator with a kind of lurking drollery - you almost expected to see them wink; the lips - a little too voluptuously full - seemed ready to break into a smile; the warmly tinted cheeks were embellished with a luxuriant growth of reddish whiskers; while the bright chestnut hair, clustering in abundant, wavy curls, trespassed too much upon the forehead, and seemed to intimate that the owner thereof was prouder of his beauty than his intellect - as perhaps he had reason to be; - and yet he looked no fool.
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