The least known, but arguably the best writer among the justly lauded Bronte siblings, was the youngest, Anne, who was born on 17 January 1820. Just as Jane Austen was a seminal writer in the Regency era, Anne Bronte – writing under the male pseudonym, Acton Bell – help shaped Victorian literature. More significantly, Anne Bronte’s works openly challenged the social convention regarding a woman’s “place” in English culture in a way no other women writers had dared to do before.
Anne published only two novels during her lifetime, but they were both excellent. The first, Agnes Grey, was excellent literary revenge on the horrible family with whom she had her first position as a governess, and the second, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, “is considered to be one of the first sustained feminist novels”. The heroine of the work, Helen Graham, is slowly reavealed be a ‘runaway wife’ … one who had left her husband because of his alcoholism and dissolute life. Moreover, Helen had taken her young son into hiding in order to protect him from his father’s abuses, as well as his father’s example.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was published in 1848, and Helen Graham’s actions profoundly shocked its Victorian readers:
It is easy today to underestimate the extent to which the novel challenged existing social and legal structures. May Sinclair, in 1913, said that the slamming of Helen Huntingdon’s bedroom door against her husband reverberated throughout Victorian England. In doing so, she violated not only social conventions, but English law. Until 1870, when the Married Women’s Property Act was passed, a married woman had no independent legal existence apart from her husband; could not own property, sue for divorce, or control custody of her children. If she attempted to live apart, her husband had the right to reclaim her. If she took their child, she was liable for kidnapping. By living on her own income she was held to be stealing her husband’s property, since any property she held or income she made was legally his.
The novel shocked even Anne’s family. Her sister, Charlotte Brontë, found the book too coarse and scandalous. Although Charlotte’s best-known work, Jane Eyre, had been declared a rather naughty novel when it had been published the year before Anne’s, its defiance of cultural norms for women paled beside Anne’s depiction of Helen Graham. Charlotte was rather appalled that her shy, diffident little sister had written such a rebellious and unfiltered novel.
After Anne Bronte passed away of tuberculosis on 28 May 1849, Charlotte forbade the republishing of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. It wasn’t from jealousy; Charlotte loved her little sister and was devastated at her death. She wanted to “save” Anne’s posthumous reputation. Unfortunately, Cha rlotte’s fear and caution is why Anne is the least-known Bronte sister, when she should be the most revered.