October is the best month of the year, isn’t it? Except, perhaps, December, for I could never enjoy any holiday more than Christmas.
These days, the air is cool and sweet under the sun, often darkened with rain clouds but never so cold that one can’t enjoy going out. The leaves fall and crush crisply under our feet. A breeze follows every step.
These are days to read, if one can. I have always longed to sit and read for hours when it gets to Autumn. Of course, it is hard to do that nowadays. Why are we all so busy?
I’d like to recommend one book, if you have the time to read in this season. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall has become a new favorite of mine.
Anne Brontë is not as well known as her sisters, Emily and Charlotte, but I think her skill with the pen is excellent. In her book, as in Jane Eyre and to some extent in Wuthering Heights, a passion for honoring Christ and living a life of purity is obvious within the pages.
I find Tenant in some ways more compelling than the more famous books by Anne’s sisters. I don’t have the qualifications to say that the writing is better, though I suspect most would say it is not.
Many say this is one of the first feminist novels. If you are unfamiliar with the story, it primarily follows the life of Helen. She marries a worldly man who quickly becomes a drunkard and conducts himself infamously both at home and in town. Helen eventually leaves her husband with her son to spare the boy from growing up around his father’s wickedness. She supports herself by selling paintings and lives quite alone until her husband falls ill and she goes back to nurse him until he dies.
I’m not much of a feminist. What I actually found most intriguing about this tale is that Helen returned to her husband when he was dying. She could have left him and ignored his suffering as he had caused her so much pain over their brief marriage. But she returned and strove to save him, both body and soul.
Feminists today would not do as much. I can’t see any woman who left her husband returning to nurse him because his drunkenness had led him to the deathbed.
A love like that is supernatural. Helen didn’t cherish any feelings of affection for her husband after all he had put her through. But she loved him by choice. She acted as if she loved him because that was what she felt called to do.
This is the kind of sacrificial love I think we all could do well to imitate. Wouldn’t the world be a better place if more of us gave of our time and energy to love people even when they didn’t love us in return?
People always say that love can change the world. That is true. But most people’s idea of love is shallow. There is more depth in real love than simply “falling” for people or choosing to accept everyone’s ideas because you want to be “loving.”
People with real love do say the hard truth—they just do it lovingly. People who really love others stick with them even when it’s hard—they don’t run away and call their loved one “toxic.”
Today, people are all consumed by self-love. Though they may think they’re loving others by letting them “live their truth,” they’re really just escaping from difficult conversations and real relationships…and losing all sense of real love in the process.
Anne Brontë shows us a different way when she writes a “feminist” tale in which the protagonist return to a man who treated her shamefully.
Yes, Helen left her husband initially, and I think rightly so. She shouldn’t have had to stay with him when he was in an open relationship with another woman and when his conduct was harming and deceiving her little boy. But she never stopped loving him as she had promised to do when they married. Separation is far different from divorce.
In the end, when the man she had pledged her life to was suffering, she didn’t cling to her right to a happy life. She gave everything in her power to save the life and soul of a man who had abused her, mistreated her, and flaunted affairs in her face.
Some may call it naïveté, some may call it some form of Stockholm Syndrome, some may call it stupidity. I believe it comes from a much deeper love than most of us have ever felt. Because when someone else loves you enough to suffer tremendously for you, you don’t learn of it and walk away unchanged. You learn of it and walk away wanting to love someone else like that too.
The reason I love The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is because it challenges me. If I loved people even when they were cruel to me, what would they think? Might they be changed by that? People change—they’re supposed to. And if there’s even a chance that I could help someone change for the better…isn’t it worth a try?
I will end with a quote from the book. This is something that Helen spoke to her husband while he was on his deathbed, about to leave earth and face judgment. He was terrified after the life he had lived, but she consistently begged him to repent, for even after living a life of sin, repentance before God was all he needed for salvation.
At the end, he wished to take her with him in death so that she could plead for him before God. While she would have done so if she could have, this was her response—a truly loving response, if you like.
“No man can deliver his brother, nor make agreement unto God for him. It cost more to redeem their souls — it cost the blood of an incarnate God, perfect and sinless in himself, to redeem us from the bondage of the evil one; — let Him plead for you.”
This post was originally published on my Substack, Writrix Unbound. Follow me there for more content!