This book would not have happened if Ann Dinsdale hadn’t shown me Anne Brontë’s last letter. I’m also hugely grateful for her expertise and scholarship, and for help from her colleagues at the Brontë Parsonage, especially Sarah Laycock, Amy Rowbottom and Charissa Hutchins. Also in Haworth I would like to thank Steven Wood for walking me across the moors and for patient and detailed responses to my many questions since. Thanks also to Julie Akhurst and Steve Brown for showing me around their home, Ponden Hall; to Jennifer Dunne and Pete Rawson at Scarborough Museums Trust for enlightening me about Anne’s pebbles; to the Reverend Christopher Parkin for letting me have a look at the Holy Trinity Church, Little Ouseburn; to Ben Butler-Cole for sailing lore; to Robert Freeman at Craven Museum and Gallery Skipton and to the staff at the British Library and the London Library for tracking down manuscripts and secondary sources.
My wonderful agent Judith Murray believed in this book from the start, as did my brilliant editor Becky Hardie, who is the perfect mix of encouragement and rigour. Also at Chatto, huge thanks to Charlotte Humphery, Kris Potter, Mari Yamazaki and Katherine Fry.
Thank you to Robert Holman for letting me quote him (again!). And thank you to all the people I’ve had useful and illuminating conversations with about Anne over the past two years, especially: Naomi Alderman, Sam Baker, Marina Benjamin, Lucy Caldwell, Maddy Costa, Lyndall Gordon, Paul King, Robert Macfarlane, Helen McColl, Shane Morgan and the cast of his production of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Amy Rosenthal, Héloïse Sénéchal, and of course my staunch and stalwart writers’ group – Robin Booth, Nick Harrop, Matt Morrison and Ben Musgrave. And thank you to my late aunt Anne Ellis, who first gave me The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
Lastly, thanks – and love – to my parents and my brother, to my friend Emma Ayech. And most of all, to Jude Cook, for enduring many hours of driving and tramping about Yorkshire, and many nights of reading drafts, and for helping me to take courage and to expand my heart.