The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Written by:
Anne Brontë
Narrated by:
Jenny Agutter , Alex Jennings

Unabridged Audiobook

Ratings
Book
6
Narrator
2
Release Date
March 2011
Duration
16 hours 25 minutes
Summary
Helen Huntingdon flees a disastrous marriage and retreats to the desolate, half-ruined moorland mansion, Wildfell Hall. With her small son, Arthur, she adopts an assumed name and makes her living as a painter. The inconvenience of the house is outweighed by the fact that she and Arthur are removed from her drunken, degenerate husband.

Although the house is isolated, she seeks to avoid the attentions of the neighbors. However, it is difficult to do so. All too soon she becomes an object of speculation, then cruel gossip.

Narrated by her neighbor Gilbert Markham, and from the pages of her own diary, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall portrays Helen's struggle for independence in a time when law and society defined a married woman as her husband's property.
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Michele Tauber

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is an excellent romantic novel by Anne Bronte. The audiobook reading done by Alex Jennings and Jenny Agutter is likewise lovely. Both narrators have a great affinity for the content and bring all their talents and techniques to the narrative and characters. It should delight anyone eager to listen to it. With respect to Mr. Jennings, it took me about an hour to fully get used to the timbre and quality of his voice, but once I did, he brought a great intelligence and craft to his reading. I absolutely believed his representations of the people in the novel, whether they were of a lower class of society or the opposite. He has a full range of the varied dialects of England and brought all this to bare within his performance of the text. Jenny Agutter was easier on my ears, in terms of voice quality, and it took no time to adjust to her interpretations of characters, dialects, psychological behaviors, etc. Her knowledge and understanding of the material, like that of Alex Jenning's was expansive and equally impressive. I highly recommend this audiobook version of the novel, it was a wonderful representation of a remarkable piece of literature.

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Carolyn Donovan

Loved, loved, loved this book! I was reading up on Charlotte Bronte, and her older sister Anne was mentioned, as well as her one novel (she died shortly after writing it). SUCH a powerful book. Slowly building, revealing the backstory, the situation described both by "her" and "him," oh, such a marvel of storytelling. It took me about an hour to get into Jenny Agutter's narration, but it grew on me and I thought she did a tremendous job. Alex Jennings as well; his character starts off someone with very little to worry about, indolent almost, but as his interest gradually grows he becomes, as I'm sure one of the Brontes' must've said, a man possessed (in a genteel sort of way (well, it WAS written in 1848).

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