SOURCE: “Feminism and the Public Sphere in Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” in Nineteenth Century Literature, Vol. 53, No. 1, June, 1998, pp. 1-24.

In the following essay, Carnell claims that The Tenant of Wildfell Hall does not challenge the traditional Victorian separation of men and women into public and domestic spheres.

The narrative structure of Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) has traditionally been criticized as a “clumsy” rupture in what might have been “a passionate and original love story.”¹ By embedding Helen Graham's diary into an extended letter between her second husband and his brother-in-law, Brontë has presumably prevented a more natural scene of seduction in which Helen could have gradually revealed her story to Gilbert Markham face to face. This somewhat awkward split narrative has recently been reappraised as not a defect after all but rather as a conscious commentary on the intractable...