The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was not qualified to handle at once vigorously and truthfully. The simple and natural – quiet description and simple pathos – are, I think Acton Bell's forte. I liked "Agnes Grey" better than the present work." Juliet Barker, in her biography of the Brontës, concluded that "Charlotte, it appears, was prepared to consign her sister’s novel to oblivion because she considered its subject at odds with her own perception of what Anne’s character was and ought to have been." Elizabeth Gaskell repeated Charlotte's words about Anne in "The Life of Charlotte Brontë", claiming that the subject of "The Tenant" "was
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall marriage." However, unlike Arthur, Gilbert shows much more esteem to Helen's artwork. Diederich concludes that "the domestic realm, whether established with marriage or re-established in remarriage, doesn't support women's self-definition as artists, nor does it provide structured setting for the unferreted expression of their talents" and that "The Tenant" calls for "more support for married and remarried women's legal rights and artistic opportunities in nineteen-century Britain." Seemingly pious Universalist ideas in "The Tenant" contradicted prevailing at that time Protestant doctrine in England and thus advocated a socially unacceptable view. Helen expresses several times in the story her belief in eventual