The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Born in West Yorkshire in 1820, Anne Brontë was the youngest child in a family whose story became legendary. By the time Anne was five she had witnessed the deaths of her mother and her two eldest sisters. At nineteen, she left to become a governess, but was dismissed for tying the two children to a table leg so that she could have the space to write; the experience led to the novel Agnes Grey (1847). At her next stint as a governess, she observed examples of an idle and morally lax gentry, which informed her novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. After leaving this position in 1845, Anne lived at home for four years, publishing a book of poetry with her sisters. A year after Emily and their brother Branwell died from tuberculosis, Anne too died of tuberculosis, at the age of twenty-nine.