The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Anne, like her sisters Emily and Charlotte, published under a male pseudonym, Acton Bell, yet still this novel was scorned by many for its exposure of the abusive male chauvinism concealed, like all things sexual, during the Victorian Era. Just as she had to use a male pseudonym in order to be free to publish, as women authors were not yet deemed acceptable or bankable, Helen Graham, the novel's protagonist and a battered wife, assumes an alias in order to gain freedom from her suffering and take up residence in Wildfell Hall, "the wildest and the loftiest eminence in our neighborhood," according to the tale's narrator. Like her sisters, Anne employs the atmosphere of the bleak Yorkshire moors and the presence of an old mansion to set the stage for a tragedy that reveals the secret violence in a society considered well-mannered, echoing the rough, cold, rugged gloom of the fictional Wildfell Hall and her family's own remote parsonage; narrating a story that Brontë scholar Margeret Lane remarked, "is so close to one of the tragedies in the sisters' own lives, that no perceptive reader can be indifferent to it."