The Tenant of Wildfell Hall he sees as "a reversal of the process carries on in "Jane Eyre"", but Arthur Huntingdon, in his opinion, is "no Rochester". "He is never virtuously inclined, except in those periods of illness and feebleness which his debaucheries have occasioned". Whipple concludes: "The reader of Acton Bell gains no enlarged view of mankind, giving a healthy action to his sympathies, but is confined to a narrow space of life, and held down, as it were, by main force, to witness the wolfish side of his nature literally and logically set forth. But the criminal courts are not the places in
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall universal salvation. Most critics now consider "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" to be one of the first feminist novels. May Sinclair, in 1913, said that the slamming of Helen's bedroom door against her husband reverberated throughout Victorian England. In leaving her husband, Helen violates not only social conventions, but also the early 19th century English law. Some aspects of the life and character of the author's brother Branwell Brontë correspond to those of Arthur Huntingdon in "The Tenant". He resembles Branwell Brontë in three ways: physical good-looks; sexual adventures (before his affair with his employer's wife, Mrs Robinson, Branwell is