The Tenant of Wildfell Hall or poet, but only as the sister of Charlotte and Emily." In 1959, two biographies were published: "Anne Brontë, her life and work" by Ada Harrison and Derek Stanford and "Anne Brontë" by Winifred Gérin. Noting that "The Tenant" was published some ten years before George Eliot's novels, Harrison and Stanford named Anne the "first realist woman writer" in Great Britain. Unlike some early critics, who considered the scenes of debauchery improbable, Harrison and Stanford believed them to be "described in a fashion which Zola might have admired." Winifred Gérin believed Helen Graham to be "one of the first married
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall on the marital experience of a woman, Bronte highlights the extent to which the internal and supposedly private realms of desire and domesticity are also intensely political." In the last decades "The Tenant" has established its reputation as a landmark feminist text. In her introduction to the novel, Stevie Davies called it "a feminist manifesto of revolutionary power and intelligence." The novel's framing structure, long dismissed as faulty, started to get acclaim as a fitting narrative device, essential to Anne's critical and artistic purposes. Although the publishers respected Charlotte's wishes, shortly before her death in 1854 the London firm of