Most avid readers can name a book they believe to have been unjustly neglected. That book, for me, is Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. 

The youngest of the three sisters, Anne’s literary reputation was in the shadow of Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and Emily’s Wuthering Heights, both of which were published in 1847 and remain far more acclaimed. Though it was initially successful on publication in 1848, after Anne’s death in 1849 Charlotte excluded The Tenant of Wildfell Hall from the republication of the Brontës’ collected works, causing it to go out of print for several years. Charlotte’s decision had to do with the novel’s portrayal of alcoholism and domestic abuse; she wrote bluntly in a letter to her publisher that it isn’t “desirable to preserve” Wildfell Hall because “the choice of subject in that work is a mistake.”

Anne Brontë was too scandalous for the Victorians and not progressive enough for later critics.