YORK Theatre Royal is running a season programmed by a panel of women, featuring work by female writers, directors, designers and actors under the title Of Woman Born.

In yesterday's edition of The Press, playwright Deborah McAndrew was, on the one hand, welcoming this focus but, on the other, wishing that it were not necessary, pointing out that no such tag would ever be attached to a season of men's work because such a season would not be out of the ordinary.

Ideally, she says, there will come a day when writers will be treated simply as writers, not by dint of being male or female. Clearly there is still some way to go, but at least women writers do not routinely have to hide behind a male nom de plume, as the Bronte Sisters did in the 19th century.

The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall was the second novel by youngest sister Anne, published under the pseudonym of Acton Bell in 1848, and while sister Charlotte may have judged the radical book "hardly desirable to preserve", it now carries a status as a significant early feminist work, championing a woman's right to independence.

Apparently inspired partly by brother Branwell's squalid descent into drink and drugs, Bronte's story charts the impact – spoiler alert – of her dissolute husband's alcoholism on the grave, abstemious Helen Graham (Phoebe Pryce). Forgive the reviewer for mentioning this, because McAndrew's structure takes great care to build up the mystery of the enigmatic, aloof Mrs Graham's arrival at the semi-derelict Wildfell Hall on the Yorkshire moorland with her young son Arthur (Ben Wood), servant and dog Sancho (Mandy Bainbridge's Border Collie Lucy), stirring farming village gossip, the sour judgement of Irish vicar Reverend Millward (Colin Connor) and the feelings of brooding farmer Gilbert Markham (Michael Peavoy).

Whereas the novel's revelations and discoveries come in the form of letters, here McAndrew enacts what she calls the first rule of theatre: "Show, don't tell". To do so, she divides the story into a first half where gossip and opprobrium rise in reaction to Mrs Graham's presence as a reclusive single mother in Yorkshire, while in the second comes "the reveal" – trailered just before the interval – where we learn what drove her north: her abusive relationship with her cruel, drunken rake of a husband Arthur (Marc Small).

On Amanda Stoodley's set of withered moorland dry stone walls that double as fireplaces, shards of Yorkshire humour around the Markham table make way for flint hardness in Elizabeth Newman's impassioned production, which fans the flames of the battle of inequality between wrongful men with all the rights and the women damaged in their path, while resonating with today's still imbalanced world.

Ben Occhipini's sound design of foreboding cellos and wild winds underpins the emotional tug of Pryce's resolute Helen, a singular woman misjudged in her time but now so ripe for reappraisal that Sally Wainwright has been commissioned to write a television adaptation.

The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall, Bolton Octagon Theatre/York Theatre Royal, at York Theatre Royal until May 6, 7.30pm plus 2.30pm Saturday matinees and 2pm, Thursday. Box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk