Tonight, for our monthly Snoozecast+ Deluxe bonus episode, we’ll read the opening to “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall” written by Anne Bronte and published in 1848.

Anne was the youngest of the three literary Brontë sisters, and her work was long overshadowed by her siblings’ more dramatic novels. Yet The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was a bold, controversial success in its day. The novel tells the story of a mysterious woman who arrives at a decaying country manor with her young son and refuses to explain her past.

Told through a layered structure of letters and diaries, the book explores themes, such as female autonomy, with unusual frankness for the era.