The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

In 1848 an English wife who left her husband and took her son with her was a thief in law, and the stolen property was the boy. Anne Brontë wrote that woman anyway. A stranger takes a few rooms in a half-abandoned Elizabethan hall, gives a false name, signs her canvases with false initials, sends them to London to be sold by someone she never meets, and lets the village invent whatever it likes about her. Then she puts her diary into the hands of the man who loves her, and the gossip becomes a marriage seen from inside: the charming drunk, his friends, the slow years, the night she tells him he may keep the name of husband and nothing else. Anne had watched her own brother drink himself to nothing and refused to make any of it picturesque. Reviewers called the book coarse. She answered in a preface that asks, still unanswered, why a woman should be censured for writing what would be proper and becoming in a man.