The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Penguin Classics) by Anne Brontë Read Free Book Online

expressive narrative, as giving a breathing immediacy to language. It would be natural to expect such voice-prints in the informal discourse of fictionalized letters and diary, as representing written language at its most intimate and spontaneous – and of course
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
is an epistolary novel with inset diary. It should also be recalled that Anne and Emily Brontë had improvised orally in composing their Gondal narratives, thus generating the facility for bravura speech and the feeling for exponential development of narrative. This narrowing of the gap between spoken (or thought) and printed words is, however, contradicted in Anne Brontë by the classicizing influence of her ‘Enlightenment’ rationalism, which strives towards the greatest precision and control.
    These two influences produce a schismatic struggle on the page which may be viewed through the contradictory notations of a punctuation striving at once toward expressiveness and toward balance and reason. Hence I have taken care not to over-correct passages where, for instance, dashes are accompanied by commas or semicolons, and where commas are absent, e.g., before a name or title in the vocative (””You are mistaken there ma’am””, ‘“you must see her Gilbert’” (p. 16), or in impetuous utterances (‘“I won’t I tell you” ‘ (p. 61) or slangy emphasis (‘no not a sketch’), even where this is followed by what we would see as over-punctuation (‘no not a sketch, – a full and faithful account’). Epistolary discourse is in itself quite enough to justify usage fluctuating between formality and informality. Hence a degree of inconsistency should be tolerated rather than eliminated. In, for instance, Chapter 35, when Helen exclaims ‘God, only, knows how often I shall need it [self-command]in this rough, dark road that lies before me’ (p. 316), the commas around ‘only’ are allowed to remain as minute breathing-pauses, substituting for italics, to indicate that God
only
can penetrate the nil visibility in Helen’s world. Nor have I deleted commas before vocatives, where these are supplied, since the formality they imply may be intended, in a rhetorical rhythm that moves freely (if sometimes confusingly) between high and low styles.
    Commas have however been deleted between a complex subject and its verb and inserted where only half of a pair of commas occurs around an adverb in the first edition; and I have removed supernumerary commas attendant on a parenthesis, or resituated the second of the two – for the reason that, in these cases,
Wildfell Hall’s
anomalous punctuation is either redundant or obscuring. I have on occasion allowed an intrusive comma after ‘perhaps’ to stand, as this is an observable feature of northern usage even today, and may have represented Anne Brontë’s own idiolect, placing emphasis on the doubt conveyed in the ‘perhaps’; likewise, commas after ‘because’ are not invariably eliminated (see Chapter 15, n. 1). The principle of minimal interference allows the editor to represent a genuine tension within Anne Brontë’s mind and expression. This tension is often in the form of the struggle of hypotaxis against parataxis. It is frequently found in long, formless sentences (see Chapter 25, n. 5), whose complex grammar of hypotaxis is strung paratactically upon dashes representing the mind in ferment, rhapsody or wandering (the Romantic impulse), bearing the broken chains of heavier and more securely formal punctuation (the ‘Enlightenment’ impulse). Notes draw attention to the more notable of such stylistic features.
    Spelling has generally been regularized and normalized in accordance with Penguin house style, except where Anne Brontë’s characteristic inconsistencies cause no problem in comprehension. Single quotation marks are used for the first edition’s double quotation marks; full stops after ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’ are omitted; italicization has been retained.