The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Plumleaf Vintage is a series of beautifully designed novels by women authors — beloved classics that may be at risk of being forgotten or overlooked. The stories in Plumleaf Vintage eloquently reflect the complexity of being a woman in the time and culture portrayed. They speak to the challenges faced by women to define an individual identity separate from a man’s and explore the ways that women have always pushed against the boundaries imposed by the mores of the time. The first three books in this series are classic epistolary novels, a form that lends itself to great intimacy with the characters’ thoughts and feelings.

ANNE BRONTË (1820–1849), pseudonym Acton Bell, was an English poet and novelist, the youngest daughter of the Reverend Patrick and Maria Brontë and younger sister of Charlotte and Emily. Because of family finances, Anne worked as a governess for several years and was a keen observer of the life of those with wealth and privilege, noting what she saw as the lack of morality they espoused. Anne never married and died at the age of 29 from tuberculosis.
Anne wrote two novels: Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). Anne’s mission in her writing, as she said in the preface to the second edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, was “to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it … I would rather whisper a few wholesome truths therein than much soft nonsense.”