The Tenant of Wildfell Hall acclaiming it as "the first presentment of that Feminist novel", she stated that "it bores to tears." Her opinion of Helen was also mixed: "If Agnes Grey is a little prig, Helen Huntingdon is a prig enormous... She is Anne Bronte's idea of noble womanhood, the first of the modern, large-souled, intellectual heroines." The only thing Sinclair wholly approved of was author's treatment of marital laws of the time: "Anne Brontë attacks her problem with a freedom and audacity before which her sisters’ boldest enterprises seem cowardly and restrained... Her behaviour is the least unusual, not to say revolutionary." Despite
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall on the marital experience of a woman, Bronte highlights the extent to which the internal and supposedly private realms of desire and domesticity are also intensely political." In the last decades "The Tenant" has established its reputation as a landmark feminist text. In her introduction to the novel, Stevie Davies called it "a feminist manifesto of revolutionary power and intelligence." The novel's framing structure, long dismissed as faulty, started to get acclaim as a fitting narrative device, essential to Anne's critical and artistic purposes. Although the publishers respected Charlotte's wishes, shortly before her death in 1854 the London firm of