Helen 'Graham' - exiled with her child to the desolate moorland mansion, adopting an assumed name and earning her living as a painter - has returned to Wildfell Hall in flight from a disastrous marriage. Narrated by her neighbour Gilbert Markham, and in the pages of her own diary, the novel portrays Helen's eloquent struggle for independence at a time when the law and society defined a married woman as her husband's property. Stevie Davies's introduction to this new edition discusses The Tenant of Wildfell Hall as a powerful feminist testament, written with bold wit and tragic irony. Passionate, truth-telling, rich in biblical echoes of dispossession and longing, Anne Bronte's masterpiece is recognizably the distinctive sister-novel of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre.
