Drawing on her own experiences, Anne Bronte wrote her first novel out of an urgent need to inform her contemporaries about the desperate position of unmarried educated women driven to take up the only 'respectable' career open to them...

Like her sisters Emily and Charlotte, Anne Brontë published under a male pseudonym, yet still this novel was scorned by many for its exposure of the abusive male chauvinism that was concealed, like all things sexual, during the Victo...