The Tenant of Wildfell Hall for her association with [her sisters'] imperative spirits." Mary Ward, a novelist, who was widely known for her anti-feminist views, in her introduction to 1900 edition of "The Tenant", accused Anne of "the narrowness of view" and absence of "some subtle, innate correspondence between eye and brain, between brain and hand, [which] was present in Emily and Charlotte." She concluded that "it is not as the writer of "Wildfell Hall", but as the sister of Charlotte and Emily Brontë, that Anne Brontë escapes oblivion." May Sinclair, while famously saying that "when [Anne] slammed the door of Mrs. Huntingdon's bedroom she
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall had managed to build a new life for herself and her two children. The Brontë biographer Winifred Gérin believed that the original of Wildfell Hall was Ponden Hall, a farmhouse near Stanbury in West Yorkshire. Ponden shares certain architectural details with Wildfell, including latticed windows and a central portico with a date plaque above. Blake Hall at Mirfield, where Anne had been employed as a governess, was suggested as the model for Grassdale Manor, Arthur Huntingdon's country seat, by Ellen Nussey, a friend of Charlotte Brontë, to Edward Morison Wimperis, an artist commissioned to illustrate the Brontë sisters' novels in