Anne Bronte's Realist "Bluebeard'

Despite scholarly attention to the role of fairy tales in the novels of Charlotte and Emily Bronte, no one has discussed the possibility that realist' sister Anne deployed fairy tales as well. But the core plot of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall strikingly resembles Bluebeard'. The heroine of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall shares the essential predicament of Bluebeard's wife: marriage to a man whose past threatens her in the present. This essay argues that Anne Bronte's adult fiction, too, reflects the Brontes' childhood engagement with fairy-tale and fantasy literature but in a subtle way that works in concert with her unflinchingly realist aims.