The Tenant of Wildfell Hall acclaiming it as "the first presentment of that Feminist novel", she stated that "it bores to tears." Her opinion of Helen was also mixed: "If Agnes Grey is a little prig, Helen Huntingdon is a prig enormous... She is Anne Bronte's idea of noble womanhood, the first of the modern, large-souled, intellectual heroines." The only thing Sinclair wholly approved of was author's treatment of marital laws of the time: "Anne Brontë attacks her problem with a freedom and audacity before which her sisters’ boldest enterprises seem cowardly and restrained... Her behaviour is the least unusual, not to say revolutionary." Despite
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall find it necessary, in approaching subjects that were considered to be controversial, to use the voice of a male narrator, appropriating, delegitimizing and even ridiculing his power, before telling anti-patriarchal truth. Carol A. Senf believes that the "unique narrative structure, the wife's story framed by that of her husband... encourages the reader to focus on questions of gender". According to Tess O'Toole, the architecture of Brontë's narrative stresses and calls attention to the disjunction of two different forms of domestic containment, one deriving from marriage, the other from the natal family. Priti Joshi, noting Helen and Gilbert's suspicion of spoken