English novel It features his most memorable character, the engagingly roguish Becky Sharp. The Brontë sisters were other significant novelists in the 1840s and 1850s. Their novels caused a sensation when they were first published but were subsequently accepted as classics. They had written compulsively from early childhood and were first published, at their own expense in 1846 as poets under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. The sisters returned to prose, producing a novel each the following year: Charlotte's "Jane Eyre", Emily's "Wuthering Heights" and Anne's "Agnes Grey". Later, Anne's "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" (1848) and Charlotte's "Villette" (1853)
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall of genius which burdens them, very many, while enjoying the freshness and vigour, will gladly hail their appearance, as boldly and eloquently developing blind places of wayward passion in the human heart, which is far more interesting to trace than all bustling traces and murky alleys, through which the will-o’-the-wisp genius of Dickens has so long led the public mind". Edwin Percy Whipple from "North American Review" considered "The Tenant" "less unpleasant" than "Wuthering Heights". However, both novels, in his opinion, were constructed with an "excessive clumsiness" and "the brutal element of human nature" was equally "given prominence" in them.