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 painfully discordant to one who would fain have sheltered herself from all but peaceful and religious ideas." In his essay on Emily Brontë, Algernon Charles Swinburne briefly mentioned "The Tenant" in the context of Branwell's decline as a novel "which deserves perhaps a little more notice and recognition than it has ever received" and added that "as a study of utterly flaccid and invertebrate immorality it bears signs of more faithful transcription from life than anything in "Jane Eyre" or "Wuthering Heights"." Margaret Oliphant believed that Anne "would have no right to be considered at all as a writer but