Gilbert Markham lives in the peaceful Wildfell Hall, a sparsely populated place that is surprised by the arrival of Helen Graham. An apparently single woman who brings her youngest son with her. Amid rumors and gossip, Gilbert tries to approach the young woman despite the warnings from the other residents.
His sympathy for her grows with the passing days, and the trust that now exists between them allows Helen to entrust her intimate diary to Gilbert so he can know her story. There he finds the brave testimony of a woman who faced her abusive, unfaithful, and alcoholic husband to protect her well-being and that of her little son, Arthur.
Despite its happy ending—the book concludes with the marriage of Helen and Gilbert—this novel, a great representative of the rise that the genre had in the Victorian era, addresses the issue of gender violence with a chilling timelessness, so much so that a similar novel could be written today and, unfortunately, the relevance of its argument would be enormous.
Like her older sisters, Anne Brontë aims in "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" to describe and criticize the hypocrisy and injustices of the rigid Victorian society.
In the context of a present dominated by the radicalization of young men, who increasingly lean towards far-right parties, the work that young mother Helen does to prevent her son from becoming a monster like his father is commendable.
This endeavor of the protagonist to shield her son from the future his father had planned for him aligns quite closely with a mission of present feminists: to educate boys instead of teaching girls to defend themselves. By keeping her son away from his father, Helen is preventing him from tormenting another woman in the future, should he become a clone of his father.
Although many may think that The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is merely a romantic novel, its argument delves much deeper, focusing on a topic that greatly concerns many women around the world: the struggle to regain their independence.
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