The Tenant of Wildfell Hall or poet, but only as the sister of Charlotte and Emily." In 1959, two biographies were published: "Anne Brontë, her life and work" by Ada Harrison and Derek Stanford and "Anne Brontë" by Winifred Gérin. Noting that "The Tenant" was published some ten years before George Eliot's novels, Harrison and Stanford named Anne the "first realist woman writer" in Great Britain. Unlike some early critics, who considered the scenes of debauchery improbable, Harrison and Stanford believed them to be "described in a fashion which Zola might have admired." Winifred Gérin believed Helen Graham to be "one of the first married
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