The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

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Penguin Books, 1996 - Fiction - 377 pages
Published in June 1848, less than a year before her death, Anne Bronte's second (and last) novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, is the somber account of the breakdown of a marriage in the face of alcoholism and infidelity. The novel enjoyed a modest success that led its publisher, theunscrupulous T.C. Newby, to issue a "Second Edition" less than two months later. The present edition, which completes the Clarendon Edition of the Novels of the Brontes, offers a text based on the collation of the first edition with the second. The introduction details the work's composition andearly 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.

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About the author (1996)

Anne Bronte was the daughter of an impoverished clergyman of Haworth in Yorkshire, England. Considered by many critics as the least talented of the Bronte sisters, Anne wrote two novels. Agnes Grey (1847) is the story of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), is a tale of the evils of drink and profligacy. Her acquaintance with the sin and wickedness shown in her novels was so astounding that Charlotte Bronte saw fit to explain in a preface that the source of her sister's knowledge of evil was their brother Branwell's dissolute ways. A habitue of drink and drugs, he finally became an addict. Anne Bronte's other notable work is her Complete Poems. Anne Bronte died in 1849.

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