Anne Brontë

Anne Brontë was a British novelist whose The Tenant of Wildfell Hall — the story of a woman who flees an abusive marriage — was one of the earliest feminist novels in English and the most radical of the three Brontë sisters' works.

Anne Brontë is the least celebrated of the three Brontë sisters, often overshadowed by Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and Emily’s Wuthering Heights. This is unjust. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), her second novel, is arguably the most formally adventurous of the three sisters’ major works and certainly the most socially radical. Published under the pseudonym Acton Bell, it tells the story of Helen Huntingdon, who has fled her dissolute husband Arthur and hidden herself under an assumed name with her young son at the crumbling Wildfell Hall.

The novel was controversial in its time for its frank portrayal of alcoholism and domestic abuse, and for making its protagonist legally entitled to flee — a claim that butted directly against Victorian laws that gave husbands control over wives, children, and property. Charlotte Brontë, after Anne’s death at twenty-nine of tuberculosis, suppressed the book for years, considering it too harsh. Contemporary readers have restored it to its proper place as a landmark text in the history of women’s fiction.

Agnes Grey (1847), Anne’s first novel — about a young woman’s experiences as a governess — is quieter and more autobiographical, drawing on her own governessing work. It is less dramatic than The Tenant but has been appreciated for its precise, unsentimental account of the social constraints on educated women of limited means. Anne Brontë died in 1849, the youngest of the sisters, leaving a body of work small in volume but significant in courage.