GILBERT: welcome to the neighborhood, mysterious stranger
HELEN: thank you
my greatest desire is to be left in peace and solitude
I’m sure you will not think it rude if I –
GILBERT: i don’t understand
HELEN: I personally prefer to live alone
GILBERT: is this some sort of code
HELEN: No
I just don’t like company
GILBERT: WOMEN
SUCH MYSTERIES
AN ENIGMA WRAPPED IN A RIDDLE AND CLEVERLY SEWN INTO A PUZZLE
***
MR BOARHAM: ah my lady
is this seat taken
HELEN: it is, sir
for I have no desire to speak with you
MR BOARHAM: ahaha
what charming banter
HELEN: please don’t talk to me
MR BOARHAM: very well
i shall not talk
i will only propose
HELEN: I don’t like you
MR BOARHAM: like Beatrice and Benedick
that’s what they’ll say about our courtship after we’re married
HELEN: your presence is disagreeable to me and I do not want to marry you
MR BOARHAM: haha
classic Helen
***
MRS MAXWELL: there are terrible rumors about Mr. Huntingdon’s character
HELEN: okay but HE says they’re not true
***
HELEN: there is no hope for my husband
he cheats on me with my friends
he’s a vicious alcoholic who burns my painting supplies and tries to get our three year-old son drunk
I must flee
MR HARGRAVE: ah, Helen
I have long been grieved by your plight
please let me help you
HELEN: thank you for your sympathy
I could use some help in planning my escape
MR HARGRAVE: I meant “help you” by having an affair
you know
to get back at him
HELEN: no
I just want to find somewhere safe where I can raise my son in peace
MR HARGRAVE: I don’t understand
HELEN: I don’t love my husband
MR HARGRAVE: right
HELEN: but I’m also not in love with you
MR HARGRAVE: well who are you in love with then
HELEN: no one
MR HARGRAVE: then why do you want to leave your husband
HELEN: to live in peace
alone
and to see my son grow up in safety
MR HARGRAVE: you TEASING MINX
WHY DO WOMEN NEVER SAY WHAT THEY MEAN
***
GILBERT: all our misfortunes and misunderstandings are over at last
and to think
it was only a year ago when i beat your brother nearly to death and left him in a pool of his own blood by the side of the road because i thought he was your boyfriend
HELEN: you what?
GILBERT: yes, they’re all over now, our misfortunes
[Image via]
Tags: anne bronte, books, literature probably, the tenant of wildfell hall
This seems like a good place to start my justice for Ann Bronte petition. She was the most popular writer of her sisters at the time and Tenant of Wildfell Hall shocked and scandalized society and helped get the ball slowly rolling on giving women the right to initiate divorce. But she died. Charlotte hated her books – or was maybe a wee bit jealous of her popularity – and refused to let Ann’s books continue to be published because she thought they were a badly witten, immoral disgrace to her sister’s memory. So now Ann is the forgotten Bronte, and Charlotte is THE WOOOORST
That said, I’m reading Charlotte’s Villette (BECAUSE MALLORY!), and I’m enjoying it far more than expected
Villette!!! <3 I just finished re-reading it last week (personal summer project to re-read the Bronte canon, inspired by The Toast) and ugh so so good. Some of the passages about loneliness and anxiety are just so intense and on point that I to pause multiple times and digest them.
I will sign this petition. Remember the child who killed birds for fun in Agnes Grey?
Agnes Grey is also woefully underappreciated.
Makes sense, Emily is the best Bronte, nothing can top Wuthering Heights, world without end, amen.
Cosign. I taught a course on the Brontës last spring and one of my primary goals was to convince everyone that Anne is woefully under appreciated. Hopefully they have now all gone out into the world to spread the Good Word of Anne.
ANNE FOREVER
Yes! This was always my secret favourite Bronte book, TEAM ANNE FOREVER!
I was rolling down here to say exactly this. Also: my personal (unverified) theory is that Charlotte 86’d TWH in no small part because the very characters who would be Dark Romantic Heroes in Charlotte’s novels are just Dirtbags, worthless, abusive Dirtbags. And the criticism BURNED, because Anne was right.
Well… if Kate Beaton counts, then I’ve got verification.
I knew I could count on someone here to produce that comic! So much <3 for Kate Beaton.
This is even the second time I’ve done it. I have no end of love for Kate Beaton and that particular comic.
It’s my very favorite one!
Probably you have already checked out her tumblr where she draw quick comics about visiting her family but if not totally check it out.
Anne forever!
Yep!: http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/j…
#TeamAnne4Ever
I will always carry a banner for Charlotte, but 100% agree that Anne is super underrated and that for Charlotte not to continue publication was definitely not the best way to honor her memory. They also had kind of a weird relationship throughout their lives too (basically Charlotte always underestimated Anne) and that is one thing that about Charlotte that does not make me as happy. True, she was crazy complicated, which is why I love her, but just…ANNE IS ALSO AMAZING AND FFS CHARLOTTE.
But yes, Tenant is FASCINATING and Agnes Grey is also the best and the ending lines of AG are imo, absolutely as powerful as “reader, I married him.”
YAY!
When Mr. Huntingdon looks like this….
…can’t blame a girl for trying.
oh lawd. RUPERT GRAVES is there no BBC adaptation without you making me feel things I shouldn’t about all the wrong characters??
Lestrade is without flaw.
Probably not. Because Rupert Graves.
have you seeeeeenn his episode cameo in Ashes to Ashes, as a truly skeevy 80’s silver fox who briefly distracts our time-traveling police heroine, because he’s RUPERT GRAVES IN A WHITE TRENCH?
edit: it won’t let me embed the photo, but here’s the link. 😛 http://s017.radikal.ru/i416/1202/e9/f1c71160c51b….
Alas, laydeez of a certain age cannot watch Ashes to Ashes because VISIBLE BRA STRAPS.
After the lengths I and all the other women in the universe went to hide our over-the-shoulder-boulder-holders in the early 80s – I’m talking strapless, backless, front-opening, halter-neck – I felt… betrayed.
I have! Skeevy his character may’ve been, but DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMN!
Yes well that’s all very well and good but let’s not’s not forget the time in A Room With A View that he got joyously completely naked in a pond and got by chased around by Julian Sands whilst laughing. With lots of wrestling and splashing.
Rather NSFW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKbBwrsEV5A
Just watched that again recently and God Damn, you know? Just, God Damn. That movie, generally speaking, has aged really, really well. If I thought I had any kind of a shot, I’d write up “An Appreciation of…” type of post for here. I just, you know, have lots to say about it. Lots. And the interesting thing is that what I have to say about the movie has completely changed in 25 or so years. What I feel about it now is similar, yet not exactly the same, to what I felt about it then.
I will always love Freddy Honeychurch, is what I’m saying, but now I love the older female characters in a deeply platonic, yet completely heart-felt, way.
Most importantly, though, is when he ‘pulls’ a posh lady and they get crazy to Heaven 17’s ‘Fascist Groove Thang’. The song will forever be sexy to me as a result, despite the obvious political content.
Okay, but who does she end up with?
I’m not really sure what it says about me but this has made me add the book to my list.
All these Dick Ribbons remind me of the time I was in the louvre and saw a lady painting a copy of the Raft a of The Medusa, it was a perfect small scale replica …except she painted little dick ribbons over their crotches.
Cause madness and cannibalism and murder are fine but dicks are straight out
I LOVE this book. And this post.
I love this so much! I love TWH so much! I keep trying to convince my mum to read it, Jane Eyre is her favourite because she was a bookish loner with a rough childhood and went to many a horrible boarding school. But TWH is my favourite because of the domestic abuse written flawlessly AS ABUSE, not as symptoms of an irresistibly tormented soul.
Oh my God, do *I* love Jane Eyre because of my rough childhood involving bookish loneliness and sibling bullying (of a kind of extreme level)? I honestly always thought it was because of the ending (twu wuv and all that), but maybe it was because of the beginning. Huh! Will give TWH an honest try. From the comments it appears the story does have a happy ending (not in the market for a tragedy right now), so that’ll be good.
I was the opposite! I loved the beginning, and then I felt like it really went off the rails with the twu wuv parts, so I ended up not liking it all that much after all. Ah, rich tapestries, etc.
I actually trace several of my bad life choices to having read Jane Eyre at an impressionable age.
This book. And I maintain that one of the reasons it’s so powerful is that Helen is uncompromising and harsh and makes massive mistakes and instead of dying, hightails it out of there and gets rewarded with the dude. It’s so great!
A+ I’m also now reminded of Hark! A Vagrant’s Dude Watching With the Brontes
I refuse to believe that little whiny Gilbert was capable of thrashing anyone. He probably just lightly shoved mr. Lawrence and let his ego convince him it was a forceful beating.
THIS POST MAKES ME HAPPY ON SO MANY LEVELS. <3
I’ve always been a huge Brontë fan (case in point: my username), but have gotten obsessive this past year, largely thanks to Juliet Barker’s fantastic biography + Charlotte’s letters. Point is, I spent the summer re-reading Charlotte and Emily’s works, and reading Anne’s for the first time, and joining the crowd to say that Anne is SO underrated. Tenant of Wildfell Hall is so fascinating and brilliant and ahead of its time and it makes me SO SAD that Anne died so young, because I would have loved to have seen what she would have written next.
Also, that Boarham scene=PERFECTION. All of the Brontës were masters of shade, but the levels of shade and snark in this book make me cackle with glee.
Helen: Please do not ply my child with Demon Rum. I don’t want him to get tiddly.
Gilbert’s Mum: You don’t want your son to drink alcohol? You’ll raise him to be a milksop! Ha ha, MILKsop, you see what I did there?
Rose: YOU ARE ALL HATEFUL PEOPLE! I HATE YOU ALL! *slams door*
Miss Miller (glancing up from sewing): Your sister has a point, you know.
Gilbert: …. Nah.
(Names taken from unreliable memory. If you say “Who’s that?!” that’s why.)
ToWH is so raw and timeless and fascinating that I want it to be widely read, but I kinda get why it isn’t, in that Helen’s first-person novel-within-a-novel is where all the good stuff is, while Gilbert doesn’t quite pop as a narrator in the frame story. But still, everyone who’s ever been close to someone with alcoholism should read it.
ToWH is so raw and timeless and fascinating that I want it to be widely read, but I kinda get why it isn't, in that Helen's first-person novel-within-a-novel is where all the good stuff is, while Gilbert doesn't quite pop as a narrator in the frame story. But still, everyone who's ever been close to someone with alcoholism should read it.
Loved this! Just finished ToWFH and was surprised how modern it seemed. Agree that Gilbert hardly seems Helen’s equal. Not clear why everyone prefers this to Jane Eyre — c’mon — Charlotte set the standard — mad women, brooding hero, cold fish suitor, and Jane herself, that small, poor piece of perfection.
At any rate am bringing this piece to book club . . .