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 Unlike Chitham and Liddell, Maria H. Frawley named the criticism of 19th century domestic ideology that encouraged women to "construct themselves as ethereal angels of morality and virtue" the central element in "The Tenant". Betty Jay, analyzing Helen's marital experience, concluded that "The Tenant" "not only demonstrates that the individual is subject to powerful ideological forces which delineate his or her place within culture and society, but that there are ways in which these forces can subverted and resisted by those who suffer as a result. In a narrative which dramatizes the complex interplay between subject and society by focusing