Literary Art and Moral Instruction in the Novels of Anne Brontë

Abstract In her own time, Anne Brontë the writer was regarded as inferior to the two older “Bells”, largely because of the perceived slightness of her first novel and the alleged coarseness and brutality of her second. For the next hundred years, it was accepted that she was a pale second-rater in relation to her sisters. That image has now been discarded; but the notion that Anne Brontë was not quite her sisters’ equal as a literary artist lingers, influenced by the resistance of recent generations of critics to what they perceive as moral messages in literature. This keynote address argues that Anne Brontë the novelist was in no way inferior to Charlotte and Emily as a writer of fiction. It draws attention to the skills displayed by Anne Brontë in respect of characterisation, realistic observation, psychological acumen, style and idiom, nuance in the analysis of human behaviour and even – somewhat unexpectedly, given the frequently expressed criticisms of the construction of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) – narrative structure. The discussion ends with a tribute to Anne Brontë’s success in making readers keep turning the pages.