The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Ch. 50 Summary

Summary

Gilbert reads the letter with no joy he needs to hide from Lawrence, only relief that Helen is released from that toil, and a painful pity for vigils he is sure she has not half described. The carriage is already coming round. Their parting handshake carries a searching glance; Gilbert meets it with gravity that may look like sternness. On the ride home the old hopes feel like sacrilege, yet he has not forgotten them. She is free now, but she has mentioned him only once, from necessity. The shocked nurse of a dying husband may never return to the passing love of Wildfell, and the lady of Grassdale Manor is no longer the artist-tenant he was permitted to know. Lawrence stays ten or twelve days and brings back exhaustion, depression, not a syllable about Gilbert. Pride keeps Gilbert from asking. He wrongs Lawrence in his heart, then admits the man likes him well enough, yet will not defy the world's laugh at a match so unequal, and will rather help them overcome the attachment than encourage it.

Gilbert resolves to wait until the six months after their parting have passed, then write a modest letter claiming the permission she once gave. Ten weeks of limited answers follow: she is much as usual, then better, then well and busy with her son's education and the management of the property. He will not ask how that property was left, lest Lawrence read covetousness in the question. Then her uncle dies. She is at Staningley, and Gilbert does not know the address and will not ask it. When Lawrence later comes through hedge and ditch to say he is going to Grassdale, then to the sea with Helen and Mrs Maxwell, Gilbert cannot bring himself to send a message. After the man is gone he sees the chance he lost. Letters from the watering-place say next to nothing. They return to Staningley for months more.

Hattersley, shocked by the death of his once jolly friend, keeps at last the resolution Helen pressed on him in the Grassdale garden: he stays in the country, a sober gentleman with a cheerful wife and a growing family. The man who once asked how to save his marriage now lives the answer. Will Helen ever write Gilbert's name of her own accord?

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Why This Matters

Performing Propriety While Hope Returns

Gilbert masks joy as gravity when Lawrence leaves for Grassdale. Outward calm protects Helen's dignity and his pride.

If you feel relief when someone's suffering ends, lead with care for the survivor before you reveal what their freedom means to you.

This chapter

Inside the Mind: Frederick Lawrence

The carriage is coming round for Grassdale, and Gilbert must not look glad. Lawrence leaves with a searching handshake. He is going to a deathbed his friend cannot wish well. The look is a test of whether Gilbert can house relief without turning it into a claim.

Continue this thoughtShe Returns to Nurse, Not to Restore

Coming Up in Chapter 51

On a still, cold, cloudy afternoon at the start of December, the first snow lies thin on blighted fields and frozen roads. Gilbert walks home from the vicarage with Eliza Millward, a civility undertaken for his mother, while the vicar still holds that Helen should have appealed to law rather than leave her husband.

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Chapter 50

Waiting in Torment

On reading this I had no reason to disguise my joy and hope from Frederick Lawrence, for I had none to be ashamed of. I felt no joy but that his sister was at length released from her afflictive, overwhelming toil—no hope but that she would in time recover from the effects of it, and be suffered to rest in peace and quietness, at least, for the remainder of her life. I experienced a painful commiseration for her unhappy husband (though fully aware that he had brought every particle of his sufferings upon himself, and but too well deserved them…

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