The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Helen's diary; and in turn, Helen's diary includes Arthur's autobiographical reminiscences. Anne Brontë starts her novel in a social comedy manner, reminiscent of Jane Austen. Like "Pride and Prejudice", "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" starts with the arrival of a new person in a neighbourhood — a source of curiosity for a small rural community. Unlike Austen, Brontë makes a woman the center of interest. Reticent Mrs. Graham with her views on alcohol consumption and girls’ education, controversial for the 19th century, soon becomes an outcast. Tess O'Toole calls "The Tenant" "the most unusual example of 19th century domestic fiction",
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall slammed it in the face of society and all existing moralities and conventions," considered that she "had no genius." Despite that, her opinion about "The Tenant" was unexpectedly high: "There are scenes, there are situations, in Anne's amazing novel, which for sheer audacity stand alone in mid-Victorian literature, and which would hold their own in the literature of revolt that followed... Her diagnosis of certain states, her realization of certain motives, suggests Balzac rather than any of the Brontës." In her introduction to the 1914 edition of the novel Sinclair was also ambivalent about Anne and her novel — while