Which Bronte sister wrote The Tenant of Wildfell Hall?

Anne, the youngest and the one nobody remembers - and her novel is arguably the most radical of the three. It is about a woman who flees a violent alcoholic husband, takes their son, supports herself by painting under a false name, and does so at a time when a married woman had no legal existence separate from her husband and no right to her own children.

It sold well and was condemned as coarse and brutal. Charlotte then suppressed it. After Anne died at 29, Charlotte blocked its republication, wrote in a preface that the choice of subject was a mistake and that the book was hardly desirable to preserve - and the result is that Anne dropped out of the canon for a century while her sisters did not.

All three published as the Bell brothers, and the fiction was necessary. Charlotte later wrote that they suspected female authors were judged with prejudice, and the reception of Anne's book rather proves the point - the same domestic violence in a novel understood to be by a man would have been read as social realism. Anne had also worked as a governess and seen her brother destroyed by drink, and the book is closer to reportage than her sisters' were.