You know the routine. Mr. and Mrs. Bronte produced three daughters: Emily, Charlotte and—much like the Professor and Mary Ann—the "rest." That “rest” is Anne Bronte and her reputation is perhaps most succinctly delineated by the character of Lorelie Farnsworth as played by Anne Reinking on an episode of The Adventures of Ellery Queen:
“…which explains…the Brontes. Oh, that is Charlotte and Emily. Not Anne, who is a minor talent.”
Such has been the legacy of poor Anne Bronte. A shame, especially when one considers that certain elements of her novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall exceed the legendary novels of her sisters. While Wuthering Heights is perhaps more robust in its characterization and narrative scope and Jane Eyre is more intense in its characterization and limited narrative scope, with The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Bronte managed something that eluded even her sisters. She composed one of the first modern works of psychoanalytic fiction, in 1848
That Anne was deconstructing the concept of Victorian romanticism at the very same time her more famous sisters were building upon is so obvious that it almost does not mentioning that she perhaps wrote the novel that Virginia Woolf might have written had she been living at the same time and under the same circumstances. One need only peruse this advice from Mrs. Maxwell to Helen Graham:
“If you should marry the handsomest and most accomplished and superficially agreeable man in the world, you little know the misery that would overwhelm you, if, after all, you should find him to be a worthless reprobate, or even an impracticable fool.”
That is most certainly a piece of advice that would be hard to find on the moors of Heathcliff and Cathy or the dark corridors of Rochester’s mansion. Well, perhaps the mad lady in the attic might say it, but she would immediately be recognized as spouting the insanity of hysterical and ill-informed women. The cast of characters running in and out and around and through Wildfell Hall seem to be speaking an entirely different language than that found in those novels by the “major talents” of the Bronte sisterhood. It is English, of course, and it is English of the higher class sort, but beneath the politeness and stiff upper lips beats a revolutionary talent about gender identity, female equality, (the “double standard” it goes without saying), and what might be termed the overarching thematic glue that holds everything else together, as expressed by Anne herself in the Preface to the book’s second edition:
“truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it.”
In typical Victorian irony, of course, readers at the time recognized the novel as the work of an extraordinarily gifted writer with keen insight into those things which young women at the time were often not capable of. The reality is that upon publication, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall proved just as commercially viable as Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre. Unfortunately for posterity, however, sibling rivalry, perhaps some jealousy and certainly more than a little good old-fashioned Victorian prudishness stood in the way of Anne’s novel being as celebrated as those of her two sisters as time went on. Weirdly enough, while Victorian society seemed not only able to withstand the novel’s assaults upon its own hypocrisy and unmentioned darker edges, sister Charlotte was not quite so tolerant. Left as executrix of Anne’s estate, Charlotte promptly ensured that future editions of her sister’s powerful, controversial and subversive masterpiece did not enjoy the posthumous exposure and success which brought she and Emily such lasting fame.
Time has a way of correcting these kinds of mistakes, however, and even in the decades since that pronouncement by Miss Farnsworth on the 1977 detective show, Anne Bronte’s star has continued to rise steadily on the basis of a reawakening by a generation perhaps more attuned to the darker edges of “the rest” of the Bronte sisterhood.
