Rating: 
Summary: As Good as the Rest of Them
Review: This is a much more interesting book than I expected it to be. I came to it as almost every reader will come to it: after having read almost everything of her more famous sisters'. I don't know what I was expecting - perhaps something paler or more insipid.Pale and insipid it is not. Anne Bronte's prose is fully as energetic as the others', and she has a world-view that equally as rich, nuanced and fully realized (how /could/ they have thought so much, and about so much?). The plot here, as any casual observer knows, revolves around the woman yoked to a loutish husband. Some have perceived this as more original or daring than her sisters' plots, and certainly in her own time, it received a special kind of disapprobation (even Charlotte appears to have thought it cut a bit close to the bone - apparently perceiving that the lout was patterned on their own dear brother). Maybe so, but in another sense, you could say that it is just the mirror image of the Jane Eyre plot. Mr. Rochester has a guilty or scandalous secret about his wife; Mrs. Huntington has the same about her husband - not the same secret, but equally eligible for secrecy. Each has an innocent lover; in each case the point is to disentangle from the guilty and join with the innocent. The device of the loutish husband is not necessarily all that promising. In the hands of an amateur it is no more than a setup for a tedious account of outraged virtue. Indeed if this were all, we would do well to leave it for the Jerry Springer show. The reason this book works is that it is not just a tale of outraged virtue: Mrs. Huntington makes it clear just how much she was attracted by Mr. Huntington: how she walked into this bog on her own, and against all the entreaties of her nearest and dearest. As if to cap it all, we are treated to the spectacle of an older, more chastened Mrs. Huntington trying to warn a younger companion off from making the same kind of mistake. We readers can make up our own mind as to what the young companion is likely to do. Unfortunately, after a bit of this, the modality of outraged virtue takes over. Huntington wallows in vice; Mrs. Huntington remains a saint. Even here, the author does not lose us: she is a remarkable dialectician, and I am not sure the case of the woman wronged has ever been put better. What is missing is an important human truth: vice (to use the Victorian term) is catching, and suffering does not purify. Indeed, that is one of the things so dreadful about suffering. You cannot put up with someone like Huntington indefinitely before some of it wears off on you. It beggars all expectation to suppose that Mrs. Huntington could have come through all this without meanness, without spite, without the slightest hint of schadenfreude. Indeed on this point (dare one say it), Jerry Springer just might be a better guide. But life is too short for that. Instead, thank heavens for the Brontes, and what a pleasure to learn that Anne is just as absorbing as the rest.
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