Author Description

Published in June 1848, less than a year before her death, Anne Brontë's second (and last) novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, is the somber account of the breakdown of a marriage in the face of alcoholism and infidelity. 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 edition, which completes the Clarendon Edition of the Novels of the Brontës, offers a text based on the collation of the first edition with the second. 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.