The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Austen's style, but "with less of that particular quality which her dialogues invariably possessed". Considering the novels structure as "faulty", "Examiner" concludes that "it is scarcely possible to analyze [the novel]". An American magazine "Literature World", believing all the novels by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell were produced by the same person, praised their author as a genius, who can make "his incongruities appear natural". Noting, that "all that is good or attractive about [the male characters in "The Tenant"] is or might be womanish" it supposes that the author may be "some gifted and retired woman". Despite considering "The
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"