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 refused to let it be reprinted, thinking it too coarse. It is one of the first English novels to treat a woman leaving her husband as the right thing to do. Sixty plates of interiors and quiet resolve by Hammershøi and Millais, from 1840 to 1905, give the novel's closed rooms and hard-won independence their visual counterpart.