SOURCE: “Siblings and Suitors in the Narrative Architecture of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” in SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 39, No. 4, 1999, pp. 715-31.

In the following essay, O'Toole proposes that the narrative construction of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall serves to reinforce the novel's thematic tension between two forms of domesticity—marital and sibling.

Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall has been singled out most frequently for two elements: (1) its unusually complicated framing device (Gilbert Markham's epistolary account of his relationship with Helen Huntingdon surrounds her much lengthier diary account of her first marriage and flight from her husband) and (2) its strikingly frank and detailed description of a woman's experience in an abusive marriage. These two features of the text, one formal and one thematic, are intertwined in the experience of reading the novel. For, in proceeding through the multilayered narrative and remaining for...