The Tenant of Wildfell Hall a present-day Yorkshire village. In "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society" film adaptation, Juliet Ashton (Lily James), argues about the cultural significance of "The Tenant": "In "Wildfell Hall", Anne Brontë laid bare the essential imbalance of power between men and women in the suffocating hierarchical structure of Victorian marriage." According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term cardboard first appeared in "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall". Phrase "tied to the apron strings" was also coined in the novel: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is the second and final novel by the English author
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"