Novel debate concentrating on questions around the moral soundness of the modern novel. Questions about artistic integrity, as well as aesthetics, including, for example. the idea of "art for art's sake", proposed by writers like Oscar Wilde and Algernon Charles Swinburne, were also important. Major British writers such as Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy were influenced by the romance genre tradition of the novel, which had been revitalized during the Romantic period. The Brontë sisters were notable mid-19th-century authors in this tradition, with Anne Brontë's "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall", Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre" and Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights". Publishing at
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall father’s farm, and Helen, being a runaway wife, can call neither her home nor her name her own. The emphasis on allusions in the novel, on using the "language of others," according to McDonagh, may be a reflection on the position of being a tenant, which in its subjugation is similar to that of being a wife. Until the passing of the Married Women's Property Act in 1870 a wife had no independent existence under English law, and therefore no right to own property or to enter into contracts separately from her husband, or to sue for divorce, or for