The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is the second and last novel by the English writer Anne Brontë, first published in 1848 under the pseudonym Acton Bell. After Brontë's death her sister Charlotte prevented it from being republished in England until 1854.

The book is framed as a series of letters from Gilbert Markham to a friend, in which he describes the arrival of Helen Graham at Wildfell Hall with her son and a servant. Helen does not attend church, does not receive visitors and makes her living by painting pictures that she sells, which is not how a woman of her position was expected to behave, and the neighbourhood's gossip turns her into a social outcast. Gilbert gradually learns what she is hiding: she has left a violent and abusive husband and has taken her son with her to keep the boy from his father's influence. Her account of the marriage is given in her own diary, and the novel sets out the case against a society that gave a wife no legal standing and treated a woman who left an abusive husband as the one at fault.

Brontë wrote the book in the years after her own experience as a governess, and its subject matter was considered so direct that the novel has been described as the most shocking of the sisters' books.