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 painfully discordant to one who would fain have sheltered herself from all but peaceful and religious ideas." In his essay on Emily Brontë, Algernon Charles Swinburne briefly mentioned "The Tenant" in the context of Branwell's decline as a novel "which deserves perhaps a little more notice and recognition than it has ever received" and added that "as a study of utterly flaccid and invertebrate immorality it bears signs of more faithful transcription from life than anything in "Jane Eyre" or "Wuthering Heights"." Margaret Oliphant believed that Anne "would have no right to be considered at all as a writer but