The Tenant of Wildfell Hall a woman as narrator. Langland concluded that "if Charlotte Brontë was radical in claiming sexual identity for women, then Anne Brontë was radical in claiming professional identity for women." Robert Liddell, noting Anne's apparent distaste for Romantic tradition, claimed that "The Tenant" criticized both Branwell's life and "Wuthering Heights". Edward Chitham in "A Life of Anne Brontë" (1991) also juxtaposed the novels of Anne and her sisters'. He stated that in Anne's view "Wuthering Heights" exhibited elements which she called in the preface to the second edition of "The Tenant" a "soft nonsense," thus making "almost an accusation against Emily."
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall women in fiction who is both competent and resolved to keep herself not be any of the accepted means as housekeeper, companion or governess, but as a painter, selling her canvasses to dealers." Despite this, in her later work on the Brontës, Gérin dismissed "The Tenant" as being "written too obviously as a work of propaganda, a treatise against drunkenness, to be considered a work of art." Several years later, however, Gérin wrote an introduction to "The Tenant", where, while considering the framed structure in both "The Tenant" and "Wuthering Heights" a "clumsy devise," acknowledged Anne's "pre-eminent gift of story-teller"