The Classic Book That Made Its Heroine A Criminal For Leaving Her Husband (Picture Credit – Pinterest)
\n\nHelen Graham turns the key in her bedroom door, and her husband is on the other side of it. Anne Brontë published that moment in 'The Tenant of Wildfell Hall' in late June 1848, under the name Acton Bell, and a critic looking back in 1913 reckoned the sound of the lock had carried across the entire Victorian century.
\n\nThe husband is Arthur Huntingdon, charming, alcoholic and unfaithful, who has installed his mistress in the household and taken to teaching their small son to swear and to ask for spirits. Helen eventually runs, under a false name, with the boy.
\n\nThe ugliest fact about the novel is that Helen is the lawbreaker and her husband is not. Under coverture, husband and wife were a single legal person, and that person was the husband. Her money was his, her earnings were his, and the paints she worked with were his to destroy, something he duly does.
\n\nThe Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Picture Credit – Pinterest)
\n\nThe child was his as well. A legal writer in 1850 put it without embarrassment, observing that the power…
Original source: https://www.timesnownews.com/lifestyle
