via Suppressed Histories Archives:

Anne Brontë's novels are not as well known as those of her more famous elder sisters, but they told truths about the abject oppression of women that English society (even her own sisters) did not want to hear, much less address. Born 1820 in Haworth, Yorkshire, Anne was the youngest of the Brontë children.

"Her second novel and the most shocking of the collective Brontë novels, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, was published under her nom-de-plume, Acton Bell, and sold out in six weeks. Anne’s depiction of alcoholism, debauchery and what May Sinclair, a member of the Woman Writers' Suffrage League, described in 1913 as “the slamming of Helen Huntingdon's bedroom door against her husband” reverberated throughout Victorian England. It is considered one of the first feminist novels.

"Anne lived for most of her life with her family apart from attending boarding school for two years when she was 16, and a six year spell as a governess in her early twenties. Her mother, Maria, had died when she was barely a year old and in Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë, their father remembered her as precocious. When Anne was four, he had asked her what a child most wanted. She said, “Age and experience".

"The Brontë sisters like many women writers at the time published their poems and novels under male pen names so that their work might be taken seriously in the male-dominated literary world of the 19th century: they were Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.

"Anne’s first novel, Agnes Grey, was published in 1847 under the pen name Acton Bell. It was based on her own experiences as a governess. Agnes Grey wants “to go out into the world; to act for myself; to exercise my unused faculties; to try my own unknown powers” but has to deal with instances of abuse of women and governesses, oppression and isolation.

"Her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, published in 1848, went further. The book describes how the protagonist Helen Huntingdon left her husband to protect her son and support them both by painting. This flew in the face of all social conventions and English law. Until the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870, a married woman was not legally a person in her own right; she was just an extension of her husband. She could not own property, sue for divorce or have legal custody of her own children. Mr Huntingdon had the legal right to force her to return, to have her charged with kidnapping for taking her own son, and with theft for supporting herself on her own money since all of her income legally belonged to him.

“Sick of mankind and their disgusting ways," scribbled Anne Brontë in pencil at the back of her Prayer Book.

"Anne met with fierce criticism for her work despite its huge popularity. Even her sister Charlotte said the portrayal of Mr Huntingdon was overly graphic and disturbing. Anne merely remarked mildly that she "wished to tell the truth" and stuck to her guns.

"After Anne's death at the age of 29 of tuberculosis, Charlotte prevented further publication of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, writing: “It hardly appears to me desirable to preserve. The choice of subject in that work is a mistake, it was too little consonant with the character, tastes and ideas of the gentle, retiring inexperienced writer.”

The last word to goes to Anne:

“When we have to do with vice and vicious characters, I maintain it is better to depict them as they really are than as they would wish to appear. To represent a bad thing in its least offensive light is doubtless the most agreeable course for a writer of fiction to pursue; but is it the most honest, or the safest? 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.”

An ace post from the Attagirls!
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