Lone Women

A recent novel with plenty of references to Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall:

Lone Women
A Novel
by Victor LaValle

Penguin Random House

ISBN: 9780525512080

March 2023

Adelaide Henry carries an enormous steamer trunk with her wherever she goes. It’s locked at all times. Because when the trunk opens, people around Adelaide start to disappear.

The year is 1915, and Adelaide is in trouble. Her secret sin killed her parents, forcing her to flee California in a hellfire rush and make her way to Montana as a homesteader. Dragging the trunk with her at every stop, she will become one of the “lone women” taking advantage of the government’s offer of free land for those who can tame it—except that Adelaide isn’t alone. And the secret she’s tried so desperately to lock away might be the only thing that will help her survive the harsh territory.

Crafted by a modern master of magical suspense, Lone Women blends shimmering prose, an unforgettable cast of adventurers who find horror and sisterhood in a brutal landscape, and a portrait of early-twentieth-century America like you’ve never seen. And at its heart is the gripping story of a woman desperate to bury her past—or redeem it.

Chapter 3:

She found a deck chair and pulled a book from her travel bag. TheTenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë. She’d read it so often the cover threatened to fall off. This book, and a few others she’d packed, would be her only companions.

Chapter 11

For a moment she felt herself between her mother’s knees, hair being combed and set with firm delicacy,  oil rubbed into her scalp with a forefinger. Her mind took her back to Lucerne Valley. Her mother’s fingers in her hair, listening to her father reading Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.“ ‘You must go back with me to the autumn of 1827,’ ” Glenville read, the opening lines of the novel. How many times had he read that book to her and  Eleanor? No other book had been studied more by the Henry family, not even the Holy Bible. (...)

And from the first day her father read them The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, that was a wrap for Adelaide. Could her parents have understood why this has been her favorite novel in the world? How the first lines of that story weren’t about some British man, but about her? 

My father, as you know, was a sort of gentleman farmer in-shire; and I, by his express desire, succeeded him in the same quiet occupation, not very willingly, for ambition urged me to higher aims, and self-conceit assured me that, in disregarding its voice, I  was burying my talent in the earth, and hiding my light under a bushel.

Chapter 14

She’d brought six books in her travel bag and turned one corner of the twelve-by-twelve cabin into her parlor, stacking the books here between the rocker and the great chair. Adelaide had brought her Bible, but also The Secret Garden and A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne. The Testimony of a Blind Prophet by Judah Washburn, and, of course, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. (...)

In the evenings she read. She often did so out loud. It’s what she was used to and there was comfort in the routine. Listening to her own voice at night almost drowned out the wind and the coyote calls. Most nights she read the Brontë.

The New York Review of Books is talking about this reference too:

There’s something familiar about a woman fleeing a house in flames. There’s something ominous about our not knowing what’s in that trunk; Adelaide strokes the thing “as if her touch could calm it.” Probably gothic is the word for all this; that’s surely why Adelaide takes with her a copy of Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, so often reread that it’s falling apart. (...)

It’s plain that LaValle has read all the Brontës and understands what the gothic demands. (...)

After this party Adelaide and the cowboy Matthew fall into bed together. I appreciated Adelaide’s clarity: “She wasn’t in love, but affection and caution would do well enough out here on the plains.” None of the Brontës would have been able to get away with this—“When she wrapped her legs around his waist, he seemed to lift her whole body so he could enter her”—and too bad for them. (...)

Maybe LaValle is simply doing Brontë one better, deploying an actual monster instead of a madwoman. In that novel Bertha is a shadow of Jane Eyre and a captive of Rochester; in this, the beast is both counterpart to and captive of Adelaide. The monster is as inscrutable to the reader and to the characters of Lone Women as Bertha is to Jane: spectral, even frightening. Adelaide addresses the monster hopelessly, as it seems to lack the power of language. (Rumaan Alam)