The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in nineteenth-century literature." However, some forty years later, in introduction to "The Essence of the Brontës", Spark radically changed her views on Anne: "I do not now agree with my former opinion on Anne Brontë's value as a writer. I think her works are not good enough to be considered in any serious context of the nineteenth century novel or that there exists any literary basis for comparison with the brilliant creative works of Charlotte and Emily... She was a writer who could 'pen' a story well enough; she was a literary equivalent of a decent water-colourist." Only in 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"