Helen Graham (The Tenant of Wildfell Hall) Helen Graham (The Tenant of Wildfell Hall) Helen Lawrence (married name is Helen Huntingdon but she is most commonly known under her alias Helen Graham) is the main female protagonist of Anne Brontë's 1848 novel "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall". Helen was portrayed by Janet Munro in the 1968 TV adaptation and Tara FitzGerald in the 1996 miniseries. Helen Lawrence was born in 1802 (or in the first half of 1803) at Wildfell Hall. Rachel, later her maid and friend, takes care of infant Helen. Her mother dies when Helen is still too young to remember her. Immediately after that,
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall women in fiction who is both competent and resolved to keep herself not be any of the accepted means as housekeeper, companion or governess, but as a painter, selling her canvasses to dealers." Despite this, in her later work on the Brontës, Gérin dismissed "The Tenant" as being "written too obviously as a work of propaganda, a treatise against drunkenness, to be considered a work of art." Several years later, however, Gérin wrote an introduction to "The Tenant", where, while considering the framed structure in both "The Tenant" and "Wuthering Heights" a "clumsy devise," acknowledged Anne's "pre-eminent gift of story-teller"