The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the lesser-known novel by the least famous of the Brontë sisters, Anne, is about what might be called toxic masculinity. As a work of art, the book has its flaws; critics at the time found it oddly brutal and doubted whether it was true to life, though Brontë, in a preface to the second edition, insisted that it was.
Arthur Huntingdon is the central cad, the man to whom the heroine, Helen, finds herself unhappily married. He treats her shamefully — patronizes her, lies to her, commits adultery, spends most of his time in carousing — and eventually drives her to leave him.
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