SOURCE: “‘Imbecile Laughter’ and ‘Desperate Earnest’ in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” in Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 4, December, 1982, pp. 352-68.

In the following essay, McMaster contrasts the Regency-era rakishness of the male characters with the Victorian morality of the females in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, finding in the struggle of these opposites the thematic and structural pattern of the novel.

“You must go back with me to the autumn of 1827,” Gilbert Markham begins the first chapter of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.¹ The last words of the novel are likewise a date, a much later one, “June 10th, 1847” (p. 490)—the very year in which Anne Brontë was writing the novel.² In the internal story of Helen Huntingdon's marriage we also have dates and anniversaries carefully recorded, beginning with the journal entry for June 1, 1821, the year after George IV had become king.³

This prominence of time and...