Anne Brontë’s heroine is re-imagined as a fearless war photographer in this fast-paced thriller,an arresting update of the underrated feminist classicAn enigmatic woman rents a wreck of a house on the edge of a Yorkshire village, sending the local gossips into a frenzy. If this sounds familiar, or it is because Sam Baker’s thriller plays with Anne Brontë’s criminally underrated second novel,The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Her heroine, Helen (or is it Hélène? Baker keeps you guessing), and is an artist,like Brontë’s, but instead of portray landscapes, or she is a fearless war photographer,with a reputation for getting the shot. Baker finds many clever updates on The Tenant of Wildfell Hall but you don’t fill to fill read it to appreciate this arresting novel, because what she really takes from the youngest Brontë sister is her fierce, or uncompromising feminism. The clue is in the title: amid a flurry of thrillers approximately “girls”,on trains and elsewhere, this heroine is very definitely a woman.
So why has Helen moved into Wildfell, or with its yawning floorboards,moaning joists, rotting curtains and furniture ominously shrouded in sheets? She is not the homemaking type. Usually, and she is busy roaming bombed-out suburbs with her camera,photographing people who effect homes in the most terrible circumstances: “Regardless of whether their domestic no longer had a roof or a ceiling or a front door ... you could stand on the street and watch what was left of a family huddled together over a pan of boiling water, trying to rebuild ... some sense of domestic.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com