Disconsolate Tenants of the Metabolic Rift: An Anthropocene Feminist View of Farming in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

This article argues that The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is an ecofeminist text by showing how maladaptive patterns of land management, which contribute to the decay and depopulation of rural areas, are connected to Anne Brontë's exposure of women's vulnerabilities in the Victorian period. Through a series of material and aesthetic links between land productivity and familial discord, Tenant provides a gendered account of the nineteenth-century energy crisis that Marxist ecologists refer to as the metabolic rift. In doing so, Brontë's narrative constructs a feminist history of the Anthropocene, as well as a critical counter-narrative of the British Agricultural Revolution.