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Sign up todayThe Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Length
16 hours 24 minutes
Language
English
Narrators
Alex Jennings & Jenny Agutter
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreHelen Huntingdon flees a disastrous marriage and retreats to the desolate, half-ruined moorland mansion, Wildfell Hall. With her small son, Arthur, she adopts an assumed name and makes her living as a painter. The inconvenience of the house is outweighed by the fact that she and Arthur are removed from her drunken, degenerate husband.
Although the house is isolated, she seeks to avoid the attentions of the neighbors. However, it is difficult to do so. All too soon she becomes an object of speculation, then cruel gossip.
Narrated by her neighbor Gilbert Markham, and from the pages of her own diary, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall portrays Helen's struggle for independence in a time when law and society defined a married woman as her husband's property.
Anne Brontë was born in Yorkshire in 1820. The Brontë children were raised in an isolated parsonage, where they thrived in fantasy worlds that drew on their voracious reading of Byron, Scott, Shakespeare, and Gothic fiction. Anne’s first novel, Agnes Grey, was published together with her sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights in 1847. She died of tuberculosis in 1849, shortly after Emily and their brother Branwell died of the same illness.
Alex Jennings is an award-winning narrator and actor of stage and screen. He has worked extensively with the Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre. He is also known for his role as Edward VIII, the Duke of Windsor, in the Netflix series The Crown, along with his roles in The Queen, Lady in the Van, and The Wings of the Dove. He is a three-time Olivier Award winner and has been nominated for a BAFTA.
Jenny Agutter is an English film and television actress. She began her career as a child actor in the mid 1960s, starring in the BBC television series The Railway Children and the film adaptation of the same book. She moved on to adult roles with Walkabout, An American Werewolf in London, Logan’s Run, and Equus. Agutter is the winner of two AudioFile Earphones Awards.
Reviews
“Alex Jennings, who reads Markham’s letters, gives us a strong sense of the youth’s energy and frustration, while Jenny Agutter, who reads Helen’s journal, never loses sight of the powerful heroine’s threatened dignity and immense personal control. Both of these accomplished actors combine to create a moving and eloquent narration.”
“The novel is vast but primarily tells the story of Helen, whose husband is abusive and dissipated…The book’s most shocking moments are the ones which depict Arthur’s abusive attempts to get the young child drunk, seemingly to spite and hurt his wife, and it’s clear from the narrative that Brontë had a lot of first-hand experience in dealing with and subduing drunk men…The book was neglected for a really long time. Today it is widely considered to be a landmark in early feminist literature, but its frank depictions of addiction within marriage are just as deserving of acclaim.”
“Of the three Brontë sisters, Emily and Charlotte are better known, yet it is Anne’s work which carries some of the strongest…themes…While the plot continues and mysteries are unraveled, what Helen and Gilber say…reinforces Anne Brontë’s indictment of the sexual double standards of nineteenth-century Britain.”
“The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was conceived in the same atmosphere as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Wildfell Hall has power and imagination, and is so close to one of the tragedies in the sisters’ own lives, that no perceptive reader can be indifferent to it.”
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