Anne Brontë of poetry with her sisters ("Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell", 1846) and two novels. "Agnes Grey", based upon her experiences as a governess, was published in 1847. Her second and last novel, "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall", which is considered to be one of the first sustained feminist novels, appeared in 1848. Like her poems, both her novels were first published under the masculine pen name of Acton Bell. Anne's life was cut short when she died of what is now suspected to be pulmonary tuberculosis at the age of 29. Partly because the re-publication of "The Tenant
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall considerable abilities ill applied. There is power, effect, and even nature, though of an extreme kind, in its pages; but there seems in the writer a morbid love for the coarse, not to say the brutal; so that his level subjects are not very attractive, and the more forcible are displeasing or repulsive, from their gross, physical, or profligate substratum. He might reply, that such things are in life... Mere existence, however, as we have often had occasion to remark, is not a sufficient reason for a choice of subject: its general or typical character is a point to consider,