The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

This volume completes the acclaimed Clarendon Edition of the Novels of the Brontës. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Brontë's second (and last) novel, was published in June 1848, less than a year before her death. It is the sombre account of the breakdown of a marriage in the face of alcoholism and infidelity. Writing with a power not usually associated with the youngest of the Brontë sisters, Anne portrays the decline of an aristocratic husband whose drunken excesses and domestic violence force his loving wife into a reluctant rebellion.

The novel enjoyed a modest success that led its publisher, the unscrupulous T. C. Newby, to issue a `Second Edition' less than two months later. The present volume offers a text based on the collation of the first edition with the second (really a re-issue of the first, with a few corrections). The introduction details the work's composition and early printing history, including its first publication in America; and the text is fully annotated. Appendices record the substantive variants in the first English and American editions, and discuss the author's belief in the doctrine of universal salvation.