and Emily was bolder; but this audacity of Anne's was greater than
Charlotte's boldness or than Emily's, because it was willed, it was
deliberate, open-eyed; it had none of the superb unconsciousness of
genius. Anne took her courage in both hands when she sat down to write
_The Tenant of Wildfell Hall_. There are scenes, there are situations,
in Anne's amazing novel, which for sheer audacity stand alone in
mid-Victorian literature, and which would hold their own in the
literature of revolt that followed. It cannot be said that these scenes
and situations are tackled with a master-hand. But there is a certain
grasp in Anne's treatment, and an astonishing lucidity. Her knowledge of
the seamy side of life was not exhaustive. But her diagnosis of certain
states, her realization of certain motives, suggests Balzac rather than
any of the Brontës. Thackeray, with the fear of Mrs. Grundy before his
eyes, would have shrunk from recording Mrs. Huntingdon's ultimatum to
her husband. The slamming of that bedroom door fairly resounds through
the long emptiness of Anne's novel. But that door is the _crux_ of the
situation, and if Anne was not a genius she was too much of an artist to
sacrifice her _crux_.

And not only was Anne revolutionary in her handling of moral situations,
she was an insurgent in religious thought. Not to believe in the dogma
of eternal punishment was, in mid-Victorian times and evangelical
circles, to be almost an atheist. When, somewhere in the late
'seventies, Dean Farrar published his _Eternal Hope_, that book fell
like a bomb into the ranks of the orthodox. But long before Dean
Farrar's book Anne Brontë had thrown her bomb. There are two pages in
_The Tenant of Wildfell Hall_ that anticipate and sum up his now
innocent arguments. Anne fairly let herself go here. And though in her
"Word to the Elect" (who "may rejoice to think themselves secure") she
declares that