Final Words on Tenant.

I said I might write my thoughts on Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, didn’t I? Well, I’m not, at least not in depth because I don’t really see much point.

Very briefly, I might just say that I was troubled by the variation in prose style. Most of it was adequate and perfectly readable, but it lacked the fluency of Charlotte’s or the edginess of Emily’s. It was grammatically and syntactically correct, which I suppose is good enough for most readers but I’m a bit fussy about that sort of thing. And then there was the problem of occasional descents into a highly exaggerated style which I might describes as being either lurid or excessively florid, or both, and which caused me to wonder whether the author had been high on laudanum or something at the time.

My main concern, however, lay with the character of Helen Graham, the eponymous Tenant. The combination of an upright, straight-laced outer nature and a highly passionate – though mostly repressed – inner personality I found believable. What I found difficult was her response to her husband’s admittedly intolerable behaviour, which is the leitmotif dominating the central section of the novel and amounting to about half the whole. It was didactic, laced with a level of religious zeal which I imagine was unusual even for the time (it was never apparent in any of the other characters), and sometimes unashamedly sanctimonious. Reading it became tedious, partly because it was too wordy, but mainly because I found myself having less sympathy with the heroine than I was supposed to have.

Having said all this – in rather more words than I intended – the question remains: was it worth reading? I would say it was. The overall narrative is simply a love story with complications, beginning with a mystery, extending through a time of trouble, and ending satisfactorily. And so I did enjoy it and no more need be said.

Except to consider what I intimated at the beginning of this little journey when I expressed the desire to get clues to the nature and personality of Anne Brontë to compliment my impressions of Charlotte and Emily. Well, as far as I’m aware there are three literary clues available – the MC Helen in Anne’s Tenant, the MC Agnes in her Agnes Grey, and the character of Caroline Helstone in Charlotte’s Shirley, which Charlotte said was based on Anne. I already had two and now I have the third, so do I think I have a more rounded view of Anne Brontë?

Yes, but it’s complicated. Now it’s time for coffee and a mince pie.