The Tenant of Wildfell Hall last decades of the 20th century "The Tenant" started to get critical acclaim. Elizabeth Langland in her 1989 monograph "Anne Brontë: The Other One" said: "It is worth pausing briefly to reflect on what might have been Anne’s fate had "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" been re-published with "Agnes Grey" so that critics could re-acquaint themselves with Anne’s greater novel and so that critics could take that opportunity to measure the substantial artistic growth between the two novels." Langland argued that the heroines in Anne's novels influenced those of Charlotte, and named Anne among the first women writers to adopt
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall father’s farm, and Helen, being a runaway wife, can call neither her home nor her name her own. The emphasis on allusions in the novel, on using the "language of others," according to McDonagh, may be a reflection on the position of being a tenant, which in its subjugation is similar to that of being a wife. Until the passing of the Married Women's Property Act in 1870 a wife had no independent existence under English law, and therefore no right to own property or to enter into contracts separately from her husband, or to sue for divorce, or for