The Tenant of Wildfell Hall universal salvation for all souls. She does not reassure the elder Arthur about this on his deathbed because she wants him to repent of his wrongdoing on his own accord. Despite his inability to do so, Helen still believes in his redemption. Unlike her elder sisters, Anne Brontë did not follow the Romantic style in her two novels, opting instead for Realism. Many critics, including Anne's sister Charlotte, considered her depiction of alcoholism and adultery overly graphic and disturbing. In defence, Anne openly stated her writer’s intentions in the preface to the second edition of the novel. Often, when depicting
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall considerable abilities ill applied. There is power, effect, and even nature, though of an extreme kind, in its pages; but there seems in the writer a morbid love for the coarse, not to say the brutal; so that his level subjects are not very attractive, and the more forcible are displeasing or repulsive, from their gross, physical, or profligate substratum. He might reply, that such things are in life... Mere existence, however, as we have often had occasion to remark, is not a sufficient reason for a choice of subject: its general or typical character is a point to consider,