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.