SOURCE: “Gossip, Diary, Letter, Text: Anne Brontë's Narrative Tenant and the Problematic of the Gothic Sequel,” in ELH, Vol. 51, No. 4, Winter, 1984, pp. 719-45.

In the following essay, Gordon studies gossip and narrative enclosure in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, as well as the relationship between Anne Brontë's novel and his sister Emily's Wuthering Heights.

The frame, however, is handsome enough; it will serve for another painting. The picture itself I have not destroyed, as I had first intended; I have put it aside. …

(The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, 398)¹

Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall quickly calls attention to itself as the longest single-narrative, enclosing epistolary novel of the nineteenth century. Beginning “dear Halford,” it concludes four hundred and fifty pages later with a “Till then, farewell, Gilbert Markham.” It is not the characters of the individual subjects of the novel nor the contents of...