The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was not qualified to handle at once vigorously and truthfully. The simple and natural – quiet description and simple pathos – are, I think Acton Bell's forte. I liked "Agnes Grey" better than the present work." Juliet Barker, in her biography of the Brontës, concluded that "Charlotte, it appears, was prepared to consign her sister’s novel to oblivion because she considered its subject at odds with her own perception of what Anne’s character was and ought to have been." Elizabeth Gaskell repeated Charlotte's words about Anne in "The Life of Charlotte Brontë", claiming that the subject of "The Tenant" "was
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