The Tenant of Wildfell Hall the general dismissiveness of the late 19th–early 20th century critics, Anne still had supporters in literary circles. Esther Alice Chadwick, while believing that Anne lacked "the fire and passion of her sisters" and was "inferior" to them, claimed that she is still "a character well worth studying." Chadwick also considered "The Tenant" to be "probably the first temperance novel." George Moore, an Anglo-Irish writer, was an admirer Anne Brontë's novels; he believed that Anne "had all the qualities of Jane Austen and other qualities," that "she could write with heat," and if "she had lived ten years longer she would
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall slammed it in the face of society and all existing moralities and conventions," considered that she "had no genius." Despite that, her opinion about "The Tenant" was unexpectedly high: "There are scenes, there are situations, in Anne's amazing novel, which for sheer audacity stand alone in mid-Victorian literature, and which would hold their own in the literature of revolt that followed... Her diagnosis of certain states, her realization of certain motives, suggests Balzac rather than any of the Brontës." In her introduction to the 1914 edition of the novel Sinclair was also ambivalent about Anne and her novel — while