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Books Like The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Best books to read after The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was one of the most radical English novels of its century — a woman's right to leave her abusive husband, argued in fiction before it was recognized in law. If Anne Brontë's moral seriousness and her documentary realism moved you, these books share her feminist vision, her portrait of marriage as potentially destructive, and her refusal to look away from what women's lives actually contained.
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Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë
Published the same year as Agnes Grey (and thus part of the same literary moment as The Tenant of Wildfell Hall), Jane Eyre shares the project of taking a woman's inner life seriously and refusing the subordination of female identity to the marriage plot; where Helen Graham in Tenant is escaping a bad marriage, Jane Eyre is trying to enter a good one while preserving her moral integrity
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The Awakening
by Kate Chopin
Chopin's 1899 American novel about Edna Pontellier, who awakens to her own desires and the impossibility of fulfilling them within her social world — the closest American parallel to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in its argument that marriage as an institution can destroy the woman who is not served by it; both were suppressed or forgotten on publication and recovered as feminist classics a generation later
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A Doll's House
by Henrik Ibsen
Ibsen's play about Nora Helmer, who leaves her husband at the play's end — the most famous 19th-century argument for a woman's right to self-determination, and the direct theatrical parallel to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; the door slam with which Nora exits is the most famous moment in 19th-century drama and the theatrical expression of the same argument Anne Brontë made in fiction thirty years earlier
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Wide Sargasso Sea
by Jean Rhys
Rhys's prequel to Jane Eyre — the story of Rochester's first wife Bertha Mason, the 'madwoman in the attic'; reads as a feminist response to the Brontë tradition and directly engages the fate of inconvenient wives in a patriarchal legal system where women had no rights to their children or property; the connection to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is direct — Helen Graham could have been Bertha Mason if she had not escaped
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Tess of the d'Urbervilles
by Thomas Hardy
Hardy's novel about a woman destroyed by the sexual double standard that condemns her for what was done to her is the most direct thematic companion to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in the English tradition: where Anne Brontë argues that women should be able to leave destructive marriages, Hardy argues that society's condemnation of women who have suffered sexual violation is itself the crime
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Agnes Grey
by Anne Brontë
Anne Brontë's first novel — a clergyman's daughter who becomes a governess in two families; more autobiographical and quieter than The Tenant of Wildfell Hall but essential for understanding Anne's moral vision and her project of documentary realism; the comparison between the two novels shows how Anne's art deepened between her first book and her second
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Villette
by Charlotte Brontë
Charlotte Brontë's finest novel — the most psychologically complex of the Brontë works; reading Villette alongside The Tenant of Wildfell Hall gives the fullest picture of what the Brontë sisters were doing as a group: each writing about female consciousness and female constraint with a different emphasis and formal approach, but all taking seriously the question of what it costs a woman to have an inner life in Victorian England
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Housekeeping
by Marilynne Robinson
Robinson's first novel — two sisters in an Idaho lakeside town after their mother's suicide, eventually cared for by their transient aunt Sylvie; a contemporary novel that shares The Tenant of Wildfell Hall's portrait of women whose lives resist the conventional social categories available to them, rendered in luminous, digressive prose that is closer to poetry than journalism
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