Fans pick 100 books like The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre follows the format of a romance novel: a governess falls in love with her employer, they overcome impediments, and they live happily ever after. Add a madwoman in the attic, Thornfield Hall in flames, and Mr. Rochester’s voice calling to Jane across the winds, and you have an unforgettable romance novel.

I admire Jane immensely. Her journey from being a suffering student at Lowood School to an independent woman is as relevant as ever. Through every experience, she asserts her autonomy but never wavers in her moral compass.

In Brontë’s world, love involves every fiber of one’s being, not just emotions or desire. Mr. Rochester is a complex, conflicted man who proves himself worthy of Jane’s love. For me, they have set the standard of the romantic heroine and hero. 

This is perhaps the best-known and most obvious choice illustrating Nature’s healing powers. Mary, an orphaned girl, moves in with an estranged, reclusive uncle on his isolated English estate. Lonely and bereaved, Mary spends her days exploring both the house and extensive gardens, when one day she discovers a secret garden, locked away behind a wall.

This garden, tucked away and neglected for many years, is the key to Mary’s healing. Through quiet deliberation, she begins to bring the garden back to life and, in turn, finds new life in herself. The healing of the uncle is perhaps the most mystical scene in the book for me, brought about by a quiet moment beside a trickling stream, where he has an epiphany of heart healing. I find the book’s mixture of nature and mystery beguiling.

I’ve loved this book since I was a teenager, but I always feel frustrated and angry at Miss Havisham’s entrapment of Estella and Pip. Central to the story is Satis House, a metaphor for getting stuck in life—its name is very close to Stasis. 

The original end of the novel works much better for me. Pip and Estella meet by chance in the street and part for the last time. The ‘new’ ending has them go off together against a backdrop of burned-down Satis House, thus removing the irony of the book’s title. Although there is the heavy-handed metaphor of the death of the house freeing them, I prefer that it retains its static power and condemns their expectations forever.

The first time I tried to read this book, I had to put it down. I like grammar, and this book is having none of it. Then I tried again a few weeks later because everyone said I should. Once I got used to it, I came to appreciate this stream-of-consciousness story filled with artists, poets, writers, lesbians, love triangles, and adventures, and, at its heart, unlikely female friendships between Black women living mostly in London, with plot twists and turns deepening their interconnectedness in often astonishing ways. 

The writing is so vivid that it made me feel as if I’d watched a film rather than read a book. A bright, multi-colored, hilarious, emotionally deep, socially aware, politically progressive, moving, and fast-paced film.

Shuggie Bain invades the senses: You smell the sour breath of Shuggie’s mum as she snores, open-mouthed, in a drunken stupor; you feel the stiffness of the rug where endless spilled drinks were left to dry. Just as important, you feel the push-and-pull of love and despair, hope and anger, as Shuggie grows up, the youngest child of an alcoholic who is ultimately abandoned by the rest of their family. The final chapters, as Shuggie moves into adolescence and struggles to break from the burden of becoming caretaker to the woman who should have been taking care of him, are exceptional.

Who can resist a story that begins, “I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. My feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining board, which I have padded with our dog’s blanket and the tea-cozy”? Especially when you know the author also wrote 101 Dalmations? 

I loved this coming-of-age story for the teenage narrator’s quirky, elegant writing. She’s an aspiring novelist, “capturing” the characters around her in her diary. She’s largely left to her own devices, along with her two siblings, on the grounds of a remote castle, with a bohemian stepmother and a distant father suffering from writer’s block. It’s a light, farcical story, tinged with sadness, set in the English countryside and featuring another unlikely female protagonist breaking the mold. 

I can’t even tell you how many times in many years working for newspapers that I rushed out after hearing a body had been found in an empty house or neglected alley. In almost every case, I would arrive to have police officers tell me, “No story here. No homicide. Just another overdose.” The newspaper didn’t tally overdose deaths as it did murders, even if many fatalities are linked to heroin that has been mixed with fentanyl without the users’ knowledge. It’s very rare for those who sell the killer substance to face homicide charges. 

The city is basically another character in this book. While the opioid epidemic had touched communities across the country, Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood is widely acknowledged as a disaster zone. A 2018 New York Times article called Kensington is the largest open-air narcotics market on the east coast. 

The plot centers on Philadelphia police officer Mickey… show more.

From the first paragraph, with its almost-throwaway mention of how a hook had given a coat "a permanent hump behind the collar," Lights All Night Long transports you with its authenticity. The bond between Ilya, a Russian teenager who wins a scholarship to study in a Louisiana high school, and his older brother, Vladimir, whose addiction to krokodil has replaced his urge to escape their industrial town, is limned beautifully. A mystery drives the plot, but that’s not why I love this book. What kept me reading was the heartbreaking truth of its world.  

Dealing with an addicted child or sibling is traumatic enough; when the addict is your parent, the person who is supposed to protect and support you, the fear and betrayal are ramped up to an unbearable level. One of the Boys captures this in all its harrowing detail. Two barely teenaged boys move with their father from Kansas to New Mexico, where the father’s descent into meth addiction obliterates any sense of responsibility, affection, and decency he might once have possessed. Narrated by the younger son, One of the Boys is more than a realistic depiction of addiction; it also shows how far children will go to gain or retain a parent’s love, which is what makes the story so devastating.

Coming from Herefordshire on the border with Wales, my own novels are often steeped in the natural reflections of eerie rural isolation, with the folklore and pagan customs of those places existing hand in hand with the newer forms of Christianity. Perhaps this is why I connect so passionately with the novels that are set in Thomas Hardy's Wessex.

And what a spell beautiful Tess was to weave around my heart. This profoundly moving novel will never be forgotten.