Shortly after her arrival, the hero’s irrepressibly cheeky young brother, Fergus, tells the fascinating new tenant of Wildfell Hall: ‘It amazes me, Mrs Graham, how you could choose such a dilapidated, ricketty old place as this to live in. If you couldn’t afford to occupy the whole house, and have it mended up, why couldn’t you take a neat little cottage?’ (Chapter 7). The lady gives an unsatisfactory answer – perhaps, she lightly tells the young man, she was too proud or too ‘romantic’.

Fergus’s observation opens up another question which neither Helen nor Anne Brontë’s text answers for us. Helen Huntingdon wishes to escape her brutally alcoholic husband, Arthur. Given the date (and until 1857, well after the novel’s publication), Mr Huntingdon would be quite entitled, should he find his errant wife in England, to repossess his conjugal rights (i.e. rape her at will), to repossess whatever personal things she has taken with her as his stolen property, and to reassume sole parental responsibility for his son, little Arthur. It is clear (since he has adamantly refused her permission to leave his house, has alienated their child’s affections, and has removed her from all access to money) that Mr Huntingdon is in no mood to give up the chattels which the marriage laws of England have made over to him. Helen has every reason for going to ground and for throwing her vindictive spouse off her scent with every ingenious ruse available to her. To this end, she has changed her name to ‘Mrs Graham’, and has taken refuge in the broken-down mansion, Wildfell Hall. In her farewell letter to her closest friend, Esther Hargrave (whom she does not inform of her future whereabouts), Helen stresses that it is ‘of the last importance that our future abode should be unknown to him [her husband] and his acquaintance’. She will disclose it to ‘no one but my brother’, she tells Esther (Ch. 43). At one point, Helen seriously contemplates emigration to America to escape her husband’s clutches.

With this in mind, it is very odd indeed that Helen chooses Wildfell Hall as her asylum. The house belongs to her brother, Frederick Lawrence, ‘the young squire whose family had formerly occupied Wildfell Hall, but had deserted it, some fifteen years ago, for a more modern but commodious mansion in the neighbouring parish’. It would not take a moderately curious husband (or his lawyers) a week to discover a runaway wife and child (she masquerading as a widow, but going into local society with no other cover than an assumed name) in such an obvious hiding place as her parental home. It is clear that Mr Huntingdon does indeed institute a vigorous search for Helen and Arthur – why then does he not find her?

This goes together with other odd features in Helen’s background. Although, as it emerges, her parents have just the two children, and clearly have lived as local dignitaries in Gilbert Markham’s district of England (we are never precisely told where it is), it emerges that Helen has only seen her father once in her adult life and – until her flight from Grassdale – her brother is a virtual stranger to her. We learn this, obliquely, in one of the early marital quarrels with Arthur, when Helen dresses in black in recognition of her father’s death, and indicates an intention to attend his funeral. ‘I hate black’, Arthur says:

‘I hope, Helen, you won’t think it your bounden duty to compose your face and manners into conformity with your funereal garb. Why should you sigh and groan, and I be made uncomfortable because an old gentleman in —shire, a perfect stranger to us both, has thought proper to drink himself to death? There now, I declare you’re crying! Well, it must be affectation.’

He would not hear of my attending the funeral, or going for a day or two, to cheer poor Frederick’s solitude. It was quite unnecessary, he said, and I was unreasonable to wish it. What was my father to me? I had never seen him, but once since I was a baby, and I well knew he had never cared a stiver about me; and my brother too, was little better than a stranger. (Ch. 31)

That brother has, apparently, been brought up in the bosom of his family as the future squire. Helen, however, is quite unknown to anyone in the district. Although the Lawrence family inhabited Wildfell Hall until fifteen years ago (well within the memory of Gilbert’s parents and the local vicar, the Revd Millward) – she has never, before reappearing as ‘Mrs Graham’, set foot in Wildfell Hall, nor, apparently, in the nearby commodious mansion.

There are some curious features here, which correspond with other curious features. Helen’s mother is never mentioned in the text – she is simply not there (her funeral may be the ‘one’ occasion on which Helen has met her father in adult life). Helen’s ‘wedding to Arthur is only described summarily in passing and the ceremony, we apprehend, was not graced with the presence of either her father or brother. Although her family is demonstrably well off (they left Wildfell Hall not because of financial difficulties, but to take up a more luxurious residence), she has brought no dowry with her to the wedding, and only a tiny portion of family jewels – on the face of it, the only daughter of such a prosperous family, marrying with full parental consent, should come to her husband laden with treasure. Helen inherits nothing on her father’s death, although her brother Frederick comes into considerable wealth. Helen was brought up by her uncle and aunt Maxwell (Mrs Maxwell was her father’s sister, apparently). It is they who bring her into society, vet her suitors, and make all necessary parental choices. When Mr Maxwell dies, he leaves – on his wife’s instruction – the bulk of his fortune not to his widow (as, being childless, would be natural), but to Helen. We are told that Mrs Maxwell (as the former Miss Lawrence) brought a fine fortune – the bulk of her husband’s subsequent wealth – to the marriage with her. It has apparently not always been the practice of the Lawrence family to send their daughters penniless to the altar.

It is singular that we are not informed by the text what Mrs Graham/Huntingdon’s maiden name was. The narrative of Helen’s premarital life (which is given through her own journal) goes to considerable contortions to avoid divulging this information in any clear way (see, for instance, Mr Boarham’s laborious use of the ‘My dear young lady’ formulation, to avoid using the ‘Miss Lawrence’ address, which would be natural). The only way we can work out Helen’s maiden surname is by speculation and the text (her text) gives us no firm evidence that she is, indeed, Miss Lawrence, the only daughter of Squire Lawrence (senior) the resident of Wildfell Hall, and the sister of Squire Lawrence (junior), the landlord of Wildfell Hall.

There are two hypotheses which the reader can advance to account for these anomalies. The first is that, the old Squire Lawrence being a dipsomaniac (see Huntingdon’s comment about his drinking himself to death, and Frederick’s enigmatic comments about congenital alcoholism), his young daughter was removed as a baby from the house, to save her from its corrupting influence. But this would not explain her subsequent estrangement from her brother Frederick (who is clearly not a toper nor misanthropic), nor her apparent disinheritance from what would seem to be an only daughter’s normal portion of family wealth.

The second hypothesis, which is more plausible, is that Helen is illegitimate – one of her debauched father’s byblows. As the central narrative makes clear, in the world of Brontë’s novel a weakness for drink goes together with the grossest sexual delinquency. Helen, we surmise, is not Squire Lawrence’s legal daughter but his bastard daughter, not Frederick’s sister, but his half-sister. This would explain her total alienation from ‘her’ family and her being brought up well away from Wildfell Hall, and never once returning even for such family festivals as Christmas. It would also explain why Mrs Maxwell is at such pains to instil a high level of sexual morality into her ward. As a bastard, Helen would, in English law, take not her father’s but her mother’s surname which was, significantly, ‘Graham’ – the name by which she chooses to be known at Wildfell Hall. Illegitimacy (and the disowning that goes with it) would explain why her family does not attend her wedding, why her husband has met none of her family (other than the Maxwells), and why it is he cannot easily trace her back to Wildfell Hall.