The Tenant of Wildfell Hall construction, the artists hand also offers a form of independence, a possibility of earning a living, in a period when a woman had virtually no independent power base in any sphere." Nicole A. Diederich has argued that in "The Tenant" Anne Brontë constructs marriage and remarriage as a comparative and competitive practice that restricts Helen's rights and talents. Helen's artistic ability plays a central role in her relationships with both Gilbert and Arthur. Her alternating freedom to paint and inability to do so on her own terms not only complicate Helen's definition as wife, widow, and artist, but also enable
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"