The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

A widow arrives at a half-empty hall with a small son and no explanation, and the middle of the book is the diary that explains her: a marriage to a charming drunk, recorded without euphemism. After Anne's death her sister Charlotte prevented its republication, thinking it too coarse. It is among the first English novels to treat a woman leaving her husband as the right thing to do. A hundred plates of tavern scenes and quiet interiors by Pieter de Hooch and Henry Raeburn carry the novel's own argument: what happens to a woman when the room she lives in belongs to someone else.