Recommendations
Books Like The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Best books to read after The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë
Readers moved by Anne Brontë's radical novel of domestic abuse and female independence will find companion works in the Brontë family, Victorian feminist fiction, and the sensation novels that developed her themes.
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Agnes Grey
by Anne Brontë
Anne's first novel and the essential companion to Tenant — a quieter, more autobiographical account of a governess's experience in two Yorkshire families; reading both Anne Brontë novels together gives the fullest picture of the most realistic and socially acute of the three Brontë sisters.
- 2Buy
Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë
Charlotte's masterpiece published the same year as Agnes Grey — the comparison between Jane Eyre's romance with Rochester and Helen Huntingdon's marriage in Tenant illuminates both novels; Tenant is in some ways a response to Jane Eyre's romantic idealization of the brooding Byronic hero.
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Wuthering Heights
by Emily Brontë
Emily's masterpiece published the same year — reading all three Brontë first novels (Agnes Grey, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights) alongside Tenant gives the full picture of the Brontë family's extraordinary 1847–1848 literary output and their very different responses to the same Yorkshire world.
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The Woman in White
by Wilkie Collins
The sensation novel that develops Tenant's legal themes — Collins's novel about a woman's legal disappearance and the struggle to reclaim her legal existence draws on the same concerns about women's legal status that Anne Brontë dramatizes; the best development of Tenant's radical social themes in Victorian fiction.
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East Lynne
by Ellen Wood
The Victorian sensation novel that takes the opposite moral position from Tenant — where Helen Huntingdon flees her husband justifiably, Lady Isabel in East Lynne commits adultery and is punished by Victorian moral convention; reading both shows the range of Victorian fiction's responses to the question of women and marriage.
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Middlemarch
by George Eliot
The Victorian novel that most fully develops Tenant's concern with marriage as a site of female self-destruction — Dorothea Brooke's marriage to Casaubon and Lydgate's marriage to Rosamond both show how the institutions of Victorian marriage trap intelligent women; Eliot's analysis is deeper but less direct than Brontë's.
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The Odd Women
by George Gissing
The late-Victorian novel that most directly continues Tenant's feminist argument — Gissing's novel about unmarried women in the 1890s and the feminist arguments about marriage and independence shows where Anne Brontë's themes led as the century progressed.
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A Doll's House
by Henrik Ibsen
The Norwegian play that made Anne Brontë's argument about marriage on the European stage — Nora's final exit from her comfortable prison is the theatrical equivalent of Helen Huntingdon's flight from Huntingdon's household; reading both together shows the same feminist argument made in different forms twenty-five years apart.
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