The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
A woman arrives at a Yorkshire farmhouse with a small son and a locked room, and the neighbours invent stories about her. Anne Brontë's second novel is about a marriage to a man who drinks, and it was considered coarse on publication for saying so plainly.
The book uses two narrators and a set of documents, so the reader sees the same events from inside and outside the marriage. Its reputation has risen steadily, partly because the subject, a woman with no legal claim on her own money or children, is treated without melodrama. It is the most realistic of the Brontë novels.
Public-domain status
First published in 1848. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Anne Brontë died in 1849, so this work has been free to republish there since 1920.
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