The Tenant Audiobook

AudioGO has reissued The Tenant of Wildfell Hall audiobook read by Alex Jennings and Jenny Agutter, first released in 2001:

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Unabridged Reading

Author : Anne Brontë
Reader : Alex Jennings and Jenny Agutter
Running Time : 16hrs 24mins
AudioGO; Unabridged edition. Cover to Cover (July 5, 2011)
14 CDs
ISBN-10: 1609981146
ISBN-13: 978-1609981143
Includes ebook.

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 neighbours. However, it is difficult to do so. All too soon she becomes an object of speculation, then cruel gossip.
Narrated by her neighbour 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.

The Times publishes a review with a (high-brow) blunder:

The gothic-sounding title of Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall has long put me off. Listening to this double narration is a revelation. The book certainly is shocking, but there is nothing supernatural about the horror. The opening chapters, in which local worthies chide Gilbert Markham (Alex Jennings) about his admiration for the widow who is renting Wildfell Hall, could have been written by Jane Austen. But once Helen Huntingdon (Jenny Uglow) hands him her written record of her marriage , the descriptions of debauchery and violence go beyond anything that Austen would have dared. Nor is her husband the sole villain: only the odd faithful servant emerges unblemished. (Christina Hardyment)

Categories: Audio-Radio, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall