I enjoyed this novel very much, but while I was committed to the mystery I couldn't attach myself fully to the romance. I think it was because the backstories were more fleshed-out than the present-day plotlines, so I felt a disconnect between the past and present characters and their relationships.

I intend to re-read this, to fully immerse myself in the world without the impulse to read ahead.

I’m catching up on my 18th and 19th century classics and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall has to be one of my favorites. I’ll preface this by saying don’t need these stories to feel fresh and relatable and I don’t need to be able to see myself in the protagonists. I’m not gonna love (or even enjoy) every English classic but I can generally take them for what they are. HOWEVER, Mr. Huntingdon has shown me that fuckboys are timeless. Timeless! It’s remarkable how modern their courtship felt. I found myself unable to put this one down because I was rooting for Helen to DUMP HIM!!! (as they say).

The story’s main characters each have one or two defining personality traits that become sort of cartoonish as the book goes on: Helen’s piousness, Mr. H’s selfishness, and Gilbert’s tempestuousness. Mr. Hargraves’…respect…for Helen is another trait that was pursued to its extreme in a way that surprised me. Perhaps this story was meant in part to be a meditation on inflexibility, although I felt like at least one character experienced some growth.

Fun fact: Anne Brontë depicted so much debauchery in this book that she actually apologized for it in the second edition’s introduction. Well, she sort of said “sorry you felt that way, won’t happen again.” Personally I thought it was a lot of fun.

I think it might be hard to overestimate just how revolutionary this book might have been when it was published. I have not yet read as widely as I intend of 18th and 19th century British literature, but I know that Jane Austen (whose writing I'm most familiar with) would not have gone into this level of detail about vices and the cruelty they may cause. And to have a wife leave her husband, taking his child, must really have been scandalous in that time when both wife and child were a man's property. My hat is off to Bronte for making the reader sympathetic to Helen (I hope that she was sympathetic even to contemporary readers), though my 21st century sensibilities rebelled at the excess of piety, and the tropes of both the long-suffering angel wife, and the zealous reformer who passes judgement and exhorts virtue for the sinner's own sake. When Helen was going to marry Arthur and I could tell, even then, that he was bad news, I sighed a little bit to see that there was more than 200 pages of dissipation ahead before we rejoined with Gilbert's story. But Bronte had a point to make, and make it she did.

I was a little surprised that some of the language seemed so modern. On more than one occasion, I found myself thinking "they knew that phrase back then?" I also loved some of her word choices, for example using the word corrugated as a verb: "he corrugated his brow." I've learned a little bit about the Bronte family in the last few months and the amount of shade thrown at Anne riles me up, M.A. Ward's introduction providing a good example. Charlotte and Emily may have been more obvious geniuses, but Anne was certainly no slouch. I'm glad I read this.