Published in 1848, in a time when married women were the property of their husbands and female artists were dismissed so readily that the Bronte sisters all adopted male pseudonyms (they published as the Bell brothers), Helen cuts a truly radical figure. She’s a single mother (shock!) who lives independently (horror!) and earns her own living as a painter (pass the smelling salts!).

While, thankfully, female independence is no longer a radical idea, parts of the novel still have chilling modern resonance. Bronte is unsparing in her depiction of alcoholism and domestic violence and highly attuned to the corruptive cocktail that is privilege, wealth and entitlement.

For these darker elements of her work, Bronte drew on her own life. Her Byronic elder brother, Branwell, a painter and poet, bore many similarities to Helen Graham’s husband, Lord Huntington. Both are charming and promiscuous (Branwell was once fired from a tutoring position in a reverend’s home because of a flirtation with his employer’s wife, 15 years his senior. Her name, hilariously, was Mrs Robinson). Branwell, like Huntington, also struggled with alcoholism, with Branwell losing his life to it at 31.

It was Anne’s unsparing portrait of these dark truths, inspired by her own life, that attracted criticism when the book was first published. And not just from reviewers. When the novel had been out for less than a year, Anne, then 29, died of tuberculosis. Afterwards, her older sister, Charlotte (author of Jane Eyre), prevented the novel’s republication. But before Charlotte condemned her to relative obscurity (forever the other Bronte sister), Anne had time to write a preface to the second edition defending her artistic choices. “If I can gain the public ear at all,” she wrote, “I would rather whisper a few wholesome truths therein than much soft nonsense.”

For Arthur and Hoy, who is the same age Bronte was when she wrote The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, this unflinching commitment to harsh truths is what excites them about the new play.

Arthur, whose previous work as STC resident director includes Banging Denmark, a comedy about online misogyny, says she’s interested in “cycles of control and power” and the way we perform socially coded roles.

In the novel, which spans 500 pages, two timelines, two narrators, and is written in letters and diaries, there is the scope to convey systems of power. In the play, Hoy uses a theatrical device to show how privilege and patriarchy filter across a whole society, prescribing roles for everyone, men and women alike. Most actors play more than one character across the two timelines, so the audience can see the same patterns repeat themselves. In the doubling, we see how hard it is for our heroine, Helen, to escape her marriage: even when she finds the courage to leave her husband, she encounters new versions of him wherever she goes. She is, Hoy says, “haunted”.

However, Hoy was determined to balance social critique with hope. Hoy says that while Helen, unlike Jane Eyre, realises “the love of a good woman can’t fix a man”, the play “is actually also saying, you can change yourselves: you may be brought up in this structure but you can overcome it and recognise it”. This is achieved through the main character Gilbert who, through learning about Helen’s past, comes to recognise his own prejudices and abuses of power, or as Arthur puts it, “he starts to really understand himself in relation to other people”.

These strikingly contemporary themes of structural injustice and individual accountability might seem more at home in a think-piece than a period drama: the beloved, bonnet-y, bodice-y genre associated with frivolity and escapism. Indeed, the modern period drama is just what Anne Bronte might call “soft nonsense”. (Netflix’s Bridgerton, Arthur says, “has a lot to answer for”.)

And the STC certainly hasn’t shied away from opulence. Arthur tells me it’s the biggest show she has directed for the company and “everyone is working on a whole other level when it comes to creating the world”, from the actors, most of whom are playing several roles, to the costume designer making each costume from scratch.

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But, Hoy says, this contrast between form and content – between the “epic and beautiful and fantastical” production design, and the play’s dark underbelly – is true to Bronte’s novel. “She was doing with the gothic what we are doing with theatre,” Hoy says. “You sit and you expect a safe, escapist, beautiful experience, and we sort of give that to people, but we also pull the rug out from under them and they realise that underneath the story is this thing that we’re still not facing.”

She has also been mindful of preserving Bronte’s dry wit. For a novel about abuse and alcoholism, it’s surprisingly funny. Hoy reminds me that perhaps the most devastating scene of domestic violence is contained in a chapter ironically titled “Social Virtues”. In the play, a direct address by Helen to the audience preserves this comedic tone.

It is an ambition Anne Bronte herself would endorse. Art, she argues in her preface to the novel, can “amuse” and “benefit” at the same time. Indeed, in the novel, Gilbert’s awakening is inspired by engaging with literature: it is only when he reads Helen’s diary – when he sees the world from her perspective – that he recognises his own place in it. Hoy and Arthur are optimistic that theatre, with its intimacy and immediacy, can similarly inspire self-reflection in its audience.

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Yet the novel seemingly did not have this effect on its readers when it was first published. It was subject to criticism and censorship, even from those closest to Anne. Before I leave, I ask Hoy and Arthur what they make of Charlotte’s suppression of her dead sister’s masterpiece. Did she feel betrayed, perhaps, by the way Anne appropriated their brother’s tragic life?

“I think it’s an act of love,” Arthur says. Hoy elaborates: “She really hated the novel because she thought it was because Anne was dwelling so much on the darkness and the bleakness of life that she died … I think she loved her and was trying to protect her, and had this fear that Anne saw too clearly.”

This answer, with all its intellect and compassion – its ability to stare tragedy in the face and still find hope – strikes me as very Anne Bronte.