This volume completes the acclaimed Clarendon Edition of the Novels of the Brontës. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Brontë's second (and last) novel, was published in June 1848, less than a year before her death. It is the sombre account of the breakdown of a marriage in the face of alcoholism and infidelity. Writing with a power not usually associated with the youngest of the Brontë sisters, Anne portrays the decline of an aristocratic husband whose drunken excesses and domestic violence force his loving wife into a reluctant rebellion.

The novel enjoyed a modest success that led its publisher, the unscrupulous T. C. Newby, to issue a 'Second Edition' less than two months later. The present volume offers a text based on the collation of the first edition with the second (really a re-issue of the first, with a few corrections). The introduction details the work's composition and early printing history, including its first publication in America; and the text is fully annotated. Appendices record the substantive variants in the first English and American editions, and discuss the author's belief in the doctrine of universal salvation.

Anne Brontë's profile page

Herbert Rosengarten's profile page

Herbert Rosengarten is at University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

'This is the seventh and final volume of the Clarendon Edition of the Novels of the Brontes ... not only have they all been edited with scrupulous scholarship but great care has obviosuly been taken to make them handsome in binding, layout and typography' Douglas Hewitt, Pembroke College, Oxford, Notes and Queries, March 1993

'It is particularly gratifying to have a definitive library edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.' reveiw of English Studies

'It is obvious to the careful reader that a massive amount of textual evidence has been compressed into this Clarendon volume. The Introduction to the Clarendon edition ... is a model of its type ... Rosengarten unequivocally introduces the text, providing the reader with a context for the composition and publication of the novel. Nowhere in Brontë scholarship is it possible to find such a complete and valuable compilation of the publication history ... One can only admire the grasp Rosengarten has of the myriad typographical and substantive errors that mar the variant versions of the early editions and the lucid way in which he presents and explains such complex data ... a book well worth having: it is scholarly, handsomely produced and easy to read ... provides a fitting conclusion to the Clarendon series and, as such, represents a milestone in Brontë scholarship.' Peter L. Shillingsburg, Mississippi State University, TEXT, Volume 9, 1997