The Tenant of Wildfell Hall he sees as "a reversal of the process carries on in "Jane Eyre"", but Arthur Huntingdon, in his opinion, is "no Rochester". "He is never virtuously inclined, except in those periods of illness and feebleness which his debaucheries have occasioned". Whipple concludes: "The reader of Acton Bell gains no enlarged view of mankind, giving a healthy action to his sympathies, but is confined to a narrow space of life, and held down, as it were, by main force, to witness the wolfish side of his nature literally and logically set forth. But the criminal courts are not the places in
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