The Tenant of Wildfell Hall he sees as "a reversal of the process carries on in "Jane Eyre"", but Arthur Huntingdon, in his opinion, is "no Rochester". "He is never virtuously inclined, except in those periods of illness and feebleness which his debaucheries have occasioned". Whipple concludes: "The reader of Acton Bell gains no enlarged view of mankind, giving a healthy action to his sympathies, but is confined to a narrow space of life, and held down, as it were, by main force, to witness the wolfish side of his nature literally and logically set forth. But the criminal courts are not the places in
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