The Tenant of Wildfell Hall the authors, having in mind all the novels from Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell published by 1848, "against their fancy for dwelling upon what is disagreeable". "Examiner", while praising all Brontës as "a hardy race", who "do not lounge in drawing-rooms or boudoirs", and "not common-place writers", considered "The Tenant's" frame structure "a fatal error: for, after so long and minute a history [of Helen's marriage to Arthur], we cannot go back and recover the enthusiasm which we have been obliged to dismiss a volume and half before". The gossiping of the inhabitants of Linden-Car village reminded it of Jane
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall have taken a place beside Jane Austen, perhaps even a higher place." He declared that "The Tenant" had "the rarest literary quality of heat," and blamed Charlotte Brontë for her youngest sister's loss of reputation. Only in 1929 the first dedicated biography of Anne came out – it was a short monograph by W. T. Hale, where he stated that in the "ideas and situations," presented in "The Tenant", Anne "was way ahead of her times" and that "she rushed in where Thackeray dared not thread." However, Hale believed that Anne "will never be known to fame either as novelist