The Woman Who Ran by Sam Baker review – 21st‑century take on The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Anne Brontë’s heroine is re-imagined as a fearless war photographer in this fast-paced thriller, an arresting update of the underrated feminist classic

An enigmatic woman rents a wreck of a house on the edge of a Yorkshire village, sending the local gossips into a frenzy. If this sounds familiar, it is because Sam Baker’s thriller plays with Anne Brontë’s criminally underrated second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Her heroine, Helen (or is it Hélène? Baker keeps you guessing), is an artist, like Brontë’s, but instead of painting landscapes, she is a fearless war photographer, with a reputation for getting the shot. Baker finds many clever updates on The Tenant of Wildfell Hall but you don’t have to have read it to enjoy this arresting novel, because what she really takes from the youngest Brontë sister is her fierce, uncompromising feminism. The clue is in the title: amid a flurry of thrillers about “girls”, on trains and elsewhere, this heroine is very definitely a woman.

So why has Helen moved into Wildfell, with its yawning floorboards, moaning joists, rotting curtains and furniture ominously shrouded in sheets? She is not the homemaking type. Usually, she is busy roaming bombed-out suburbs with her camera, photographing people who make homes in the most terrible circumstances: “Regardless of whether their home no longer had a roof or a ceiling or a front door ... you could stand on the street and watch what was left of a family huddled together over a pan of boiling water, trying to rebuild ... some sense of home.”

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