Novel debate concentrating on questions around the moral soundness of the modern novel. Questions about artistic integrity, as well as aesthetics, including, for example. the idea of "art for art's sake", proposed by writers like Oscar Wilde and Algernon Charles Swinburne, were also important. Major British writers such as Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy were influenced by the romance genre tradition of the novel, which had been revitalized during the Romantic period. The Brontë sisters were notable mid-19th-century authors in this tradition, with Anne Brontë's "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall", Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre" and Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights". Publishing at
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall which to take a comprehensive view of humanity and the novelist who confines his observation to them is not likely to produce any lasting impression except of horror and disgust". "Sharpe's London Magazine", believing "despite reports to the contrary" that "[no] woman could have written such a work", warned its readers, especially ladies, against reading "The Tenant". While acknowledging "the powerful interest of the story", "the talent with which it is written" and an "excellent moral", it argued that "like the fatal melody of the Syren's song, its very perfections render it more dangerous, and therefore more carefully to be