Tenant

In Berkshire, I sat out in the peaceful garden of our rental house and read the second half of "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" by Anne Brontë . Can you see the garden furniture where I sat, turning the pages well into the summer dusk? Once I even fell asleep out there for perhaps half an hour and woke up in semi-darkness. The temperature was as balmy as it is meant to be on summer evenings and I felt relaxed - my mind emptied of the usual mental interference and wholly focused on Anne Brontë  's writing.

The novel was published in 1848. The "tenant" in the title is a young widow who has sought sanctuary in a place where she is not known. An air of mystery surrounds her and local people gossip about her, putting two and two together and making five. An eligible local young man called Gilbert Markham is greatly attracted to her but she spurns all of his advances.

It turns out that she had married a wrong 'un - a caddish upper class drunkard who was hell bent on pleasure  and treated his wife as a doormat. He even spoke insultingly of the young son they had conceived together.

I haven't given too much of the story away in case you ever choose to read this novel too. 

I found the early Victorian language quite easy to follow - so different from when I read my first Victorian novels when I was a teenager. Back then I stumbled along but with this novel I simply motored. It was easy - perhaps testament to my career in education and a lifetime of reading.

Here's a little sample:-

“Keep a guard over your eyes and ears as the inlets of your heart, and over your lips as the outlet, lest they betray you in a moment of unwariness. Receive, coldly and dispassionately, every attention, till you have ascertained and duly considered the worth of the aspirant; and let your affections be consequent upon approbation alone. First study; then approve; then love. Let your eyes be blind to all external attractions, your ears deaf to all the fascinations of flattery and light discourse. - These are nothing - and worse than nothing - snares and wiles of the tempter, to lure the thoughtless to their own destruction. Principle is the first thing, after all; and next to that, good sense, respectability, and moderate wealth. If you should marry the handsomest, and most accomplished and superficially agreeable man in the world, you little know the misery that would overwhelm you if, after all, you should find him to be a worthless reprobate, or even an impracticable fool.”

Yes - I know - not every reader's cup of tea but I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and of course, like Dave in southern Ireland, I have always been a sucker for the Brontës. By the way, Anne Brontë died just a year after "The Tenant of Wilodfell Hall" was published. She was twenty nine years old. She also left poetry and another novel - "Agnes Gray" which I have never read but which is now most definitely on my list.