SOURCE: “Narrative Experience as a Means to Maturity in Anne Brontë's Victorian Novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” in Connecticut Review, Vol. 14, No. 2, Fall, 1992, pp. 41-47.

In the following essay, Kostka considers Gilbert Markham's reading of Helen Huntingdon's diary as the act of an inexperienced male achieving maturity via female writing.

One of the pleasures of studying literature is the unexpected encounter with ingenious design. Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a case in point. At first Tenant appears to be a Brontëan version of the male “Bildungsroman” which traditionally catalogues the progress of a young man's development. But Brontë effects a subtle turn as she shifts her narrative from the focus of an immature youth who has yet to gain knowledge of the ways of the world, to that of a woman who has already learned the painful lessons such worldly knowledge...