Tenant
In Berkshire, I sat out in the peaceful garden of our rental house and read the second half of "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" by Anne Brontë . Can you see the garden furniture where I sat, turning the pages well into the summer dusk? Once I even fell asleep out there for perhaps half an hour and woke up in semi-darkness. The temperature was as balmy as it is meant to be on summer evenings and I felt relaxed - my mind emptied of the usual mental interference and wholly focused on Anne Brontë 's writing. The novel was published in 1848. The "tenant" in the title is a young widow who has sought sanctuary in a place where she is not known. An air of mystery surrounds her and local people gossip about her, putting two and two together and making five. An eligible local young man called Gilbert Markham is greatly attracted to her but she spurns all of his advances. It turns out that she had married a wrong 'un - a caddish upper class drunkard who was hell ben...