Gender, conflict, continuity: Anne Brontë's 'The Tenant of Wildfell Hall' (1848) and Sarah Grand's 'The Heavenly Twins' (1893)

Abstract

The New Woman fiction of the fin de siècle brought into conflict patriarchal and feminist ideologies, challenging widely held assumptions about gender roles and the position of women. Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins is an important contribution to the genre, and engages with a number of the key issues that concerned feminists at the end of the nineteenth century, including marriage, the education of women, the double standard, male licentiousness, and the wider issue of social purity. These are also key themes in Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall — published nearly fifty years before Grand's seminal New Woman text. In this essay, I consider Anne Brontë's text as a forerunner to the New Woman fiction of the fin de siècle, through a comparative examination of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and The Heavenly Twins.