SOURCE: “The Question of Credibility in Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” in English Studies, Vol. 63, No. 3, June, 1982, pp. 198-206.

In the following essay, Jackson asserts that The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, despite the flaw of its somewhat burdensome narrative structure, avoids melodrama by counter-balancing Helen Huntingdon's psychological realism with the debauched behavior of her husband Arthur.

Author of Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Anne Brontë is the least known of the Brontë family, but seems ready for rediscovery in this period of new interest in minor and neglected women writers. Measured against her sisters, Anne becomes the inferior artist, either because her novels lack the passion of a Jane Eyre or Villette, or the ‘other world’ drama of a Wuthering Heights. Without the searing intensity of Charlotte or the dramatic inventiveness of Emily, however, Anne demonstrates through her writing that she has...