The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Anne Brontë to criticize the domestic sphere as established by marriage and re-established with remarriage. At the beginning of her diary, the young and unmarried Helen already defines herself as an artist. Her early drawings reveal her private and true feelings for Arthur Huntingdon, feelings that lead her to overlook his true character and lose herself to marriage. Nevertheless, in addition to revealing Helen's true desires, the self-expression of her artwork also defines her as an artist. That she puts so much of herself into her paintings and drawings attests to this self-definition. After her marriage to Arthur, Helen, accepting
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall painfully discordant to one who would fain have sheltered herself from all but peaceful and religious ideas." In his essay on Emily Brontë, Algernon Charles Swinburne briefly mentioned "The Tenant" in the context of Branwell's decline as a novel "which deserves perhaps a little more notice and recognition than it has ever received" and added that "as a study of utterly flaccid and invertebrate immorality it bears signs of more faithful transcription from life than anything in "Jane Eyre" or "Wuthering Heights"." Margaret Oliphant believed that Anne "would have no right to be considered at all as a writer but