ABSTRACT
This article locates Anne Bronte’s The Tenant o f Wildfell Hall (1848) within the rich yet often misunderstood context of the religious influences that helped shape her life to argue that distincdy Evangelical reading practices helped her perform powerful analyses of Victorian culture and informed the narrative structure of the novel. Her maternal inheritance of a particular run of the Methodist Magazine furnished Bronte with important source materials and a range of narrative strategies that enabled her to critique the world in which she lived. After setting up the familial and religious context of Bronte’s writings, I turn to The Tenant o f Wildfell Hall to demonstrate how her engagement with early nineteenth-century and contemporary religious debates helped Bronte disrupt received ideas about gender, education, the learning process and the sanctity of the domestic sphere.
