The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

I asked for this for Christmas, with the aim in mind of reading all of the Brontë novels before 2013. What I didn't know at the time is that this is considered to be one of the first unapologetically feminist novels. There's a scene where the protagonist, Helen Huntingdon, slams a door in her husband's face. Victorian society had a huge hissy fit about this, with Sharpe's magazine managing to expectorate, between outraged gasps, that the book was not "fit subject matter ... to be obtruded by every circulating library-keeper upon the notice of our sisters, wives, and daughters."

In brief: the book is an epistolary novel, told in the form of Gilbert Markham's letters about how he met the mysterious tenant of a nearby property, Helen Graham. Gilbert, being a lead man in Regency novel, is of course a single man in possesion of good fortune and desperately in want of a leading lady. Forgetting quickly about a ringletted vicar's daughter who he's been sniffing around for the sake of narrative, he promptly falls in love with the dark-eyed, watercolour-painting widow, who rents a few dark rooms with her infant son and his nurse.

The local gossips soon start whispering about how Helen's son Arthur bears a remarkable resemblance to her landlord, Frederick Lawrence, a friend of Gilbert's. Gilbert refuses to believe such nonsense until he goes to make his move on Helen, gets sharply knocked back and then hangs around to hear a fairly intense conversation between she and Frederick. He confronts Helen, who lets him read her diary as explanation. All is revealed: Helen is no widow but a wife on the run, attempting to prevent her child from the rakish influence of his alcoholic, adulterous father, Arthur Huntingdon.

The section of the novel dealing with Helen's life with Arthur is pretty harrowing, even for a Bronte. Arthur Huntingdon is an awful villain, and the book's pages are rife with descriptions of domestic violence, adultery, psychological bullying, and even child abuse, with Huntingdon senior force-feeding his young son vast quantities of wine and whisky in order to upset the temperance tendancies of his wife. Helen's escape, with the help of Frederick, is about far more than a woman asserting her individual rights: it is about a human being escaping complete tyranny. This is the only way to understand domestic abuse, and therefore this book should be thrown in the face of everyone defending the recent moronic actions of Chris Brown and PETA.

The book does a lot to drive home the contemporary point that, for many women, the structure of and laws surrounding marriage resulted in instability and entrapment rather than a secure environment. Until 1870, married women in England had no rights to call a divorce, hold property or petition for custody of their children. A large contrast is drawn between Helen, who has to flee her husband in the dead of night, and change her name to avoid detection, and the cuckolded Lord Lowborough, who easily divorces his wife and takes their children, leaving her destitute in France without so much as maintenance payment. Elsewhere there are numerous women unhappy in marriage: it is implied that Helen was sent to live with her aunt due to the alcoholism of her Father; Millicent is nagged into marriage and Gilbert's own mother, a wearied and bitter gossip, explicitly states, perhaps to her chagrin, that it is 'the husband's business to please himself, and [the wife's] to please him'.

The point is driven home, but not laboured. It's obvious what Bronte was trying to achieve, but the skill with which the characters are written makes the novel into much more than a feminist tract. It's a damn good story too. This is how you seek equality - by writing with passion, not unmeasured anger; by making points with daggers and not blunderbusses.

Ponden Hall, Yorkshire, the supposed model for Wildfell Hall.