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 the same subject as her sisters, Anne presents it in completely different light. Wildfell Hall, an old superannuated mansion, she pictures not as a ‘haunted’ house like Thornfield Hall or Wuthering Heights in her sisters' works, but as a decayed relic of an outworn patrician class, whose pretensions are mocked by the recrudescence of building into moor. Stevie Davies has argued that Anne's ancient hall demystifies Gothic. Wildfell Hall is not haunted, it is simply dilapidated, damp and un-welcoming. Anne's portrayal of Arthur Huntingdon deflates Byronic cult – while witty, adventurous and handsome, he is not endowed with intellectual gifts,