This is the story of a woman's struggle for independence. Helen "Graham" has returned to Wildfell Hall in flight from a disastrous marriage. Exiled to the
desolate moorland mansion, she adopts an assumed name and earns her living as a painter.

The Tennant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte

  Anne Bronte's second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, was described as "coarse" and "brutal" at the time it was written (1848). Nineteenth century convention was that women belonged in the home, under their husbands thumb. (Indeed, the idiom "rule of thumb" comes from the law that a man could not beat his wife with anything thicker than his thumb). Bronte, however, goes against custom in this novel of perseverance and pride.