Happy Birthday, Acton Bell!
It's Anne Bronte's 185th birthday! She was born on this day on 1820 in Yorkshire, England. (In case you aren't a nerd like me, you may not know that Anne's pen name was Acton Bell; hence the title of this post.) Anne died of tuberculosis in 1849 at only 29 years of age.
I will never understand why Anne's most famous work continues to be Agnes Grey. I found it rather dull. Had it not been for the urging of Lynn "Everywoman" Conroy, I would never have read Anne's second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which was actually much better. It's no Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights, (I am such a fan of WH!) but it's definitely worth a read if you're a fan of 19th-century British novels. (Hard as it is for me to come to grips with, I realize that there are a few people who aren't fans of 19th-century British novels and that they may even [gulp!] be reading my blog!)
posted by LC @ 10:23 AM
2 Comments:
Where are they? Where are they? Are you hiding them? You tie them down and I'll read Far from the Madding Crowd to them.
Garrison Keillor had some interesting stuff on The Tenant in the daily mailing...
Anne went ahead and wrote her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), which was an immediate success. The heroine, Helen Huntingdon, leaves her husband to protect their young son from his influence. She supports herself and her son by painting while living in hiding. In doing so, she violates social conventions and English law. At the time, a married woman had no independent legal existence apart from her husband. It was later said that the slamming of Helen Huntingdon's bedroom door against her husband reverberated throughout Victorian England.
In the second printing of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Brontë responded to critics who said her portrayal of the husband was graphic and disturbing. She wrote, "Is it better to reveal the snares and pitfalls of life to the young and thoughtless traveller, or to cover them with branches and flowers? O Reader! if there were less of this delicate concealment of facts-this whispering "Peace, peace," when there is no peace, there would be less of sin and misery to the young of both sexes who are left to wring their bitter knowledge from experience."
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