Apologies for the weird wording. I'd just finished Anne Brontë's 'The Tenant of Wildfell Hall', and was impressed by how explicit the portrayal of Arthur Huntingdon's manipulative, gaslighting narcissism is. Reading it made me damn sure that Anne had seen this behaviour first hand. It wasn't cartoonish villainy, it was textbook manipulation.
There's obviously been domestic male villains in fiction before the Brontë's (shoutout to Anne Radcliffe), but I'm wondering if there is such an explicit, realistic domestic portrayal of such a character earlier than this novel? It feels groundbreaking, even when compared to her sister's work.
Have been wondering what the response to it was, at the time. Wikipedia calls it perhaps the most "shocking" Brontë novel, but did it shed significant light on abusive, controlling behaviour?
by Gay_For_Gary_Oldman