English novel It features his most memorable character, the engagingly roguish Becky Sharp. The Brontë sisters were other significant novelists in the 1840s and 1850s. Their novels caused a sensation when they were first published but were subsequently accepted as classics. They had written compulsively from early childhood and were first published, at their own expense in 1846 as poets under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. The sisters returned to prose, producing a novel each the following year: Charlotte's "Jane Eyre", Emily's "Wuthering Heights" and Anne's "Agnes Grey". Later, Anne's "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" (1848) and Charlotte's "Villette" (1853)
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall to write; still less has it been a pleasant training which could teach an author such awful facts, or give courage to write them. The fault of the book is coarseness--not merely that coarseness of subject which will be the stumbling-block of most readers, and which makes it utterly unfit to be put into the hands of girls..." Despite this, he believed that: "[English] society owes thanks, not sneers, to those who dare to shew her the image of her own ugly, hypocritical visage". "Spectator" wrote: ""The Tenant of Wildfell Hall", like its predecessor ["Jane Eyre"], suggests the idea of