Agnes Grey (3 page)

Not long after, in 1821, Mrs. Brontë died. Her sister Elizabeth joined the family to superintend the children and the household. But further tragedy was in store, when the two eldest girls, Maria and Elizabeth, returned from school ill in 1825 and soon died. (Charlotte and Emily had followed their sisters to the same school but now were brought home.) This may have been due to the arrival of what would, sadly, be their only lasting legacy to the family—tuberculosis, which many years later would carry off Emily and Anne, and possibly Branwell, too. One effect of this was Patrick’s determination that he would educate the remaining children at home, at least for the major part of their schooling; another effect was that the remaining children became extremely close emotionally, tied to each other, to their aunt, to their father, and to Haworth itself.

Still, though none of us can choose our parents, it was a great stroke of luck for any girl at this time to be the daughter of a clergyman. Young women of the lower ranks of the professional and middle classes rarely were allowed any education beyond music, drawing, and the smattering of general knowledge deemed sufficient to entertain prospective husbands by the distaff side of the hearth. But a clergyman’s daughter had access to both a learned father and his library, and the Brontë girls were luckier still in that Patrick seemed ready to teach them fully much as he did Branwell. Certainly it was also fortuitous that Patrick was an author himself, a writer not only (necessarily) of weekly sermons, but a published poet and essayist of some genuine local repute. They read widely in the standard works of English literature; they subscribed to leading periodicals; and they had access to a lending library an easy walk away in the next town, Keighley. Anne could not have known this at first, but she was receiving excellent training to be a governess, learning music, drawing, and even Latin along with more general studies in literature, history, and geography.

Another key event in their lives was the seemingly inauspicious arrival of a set of toy soldiers purchased by Patrick in 1826. The eldest children, Charlotte and Branwell, apparently soon began transforming the figures into favorite semi-historical characters and inventing plays and tales involving them; the youngest, Emily and Anne, were brought in on the game as well. The writings developed over time into a remarkable series of extended prose manuscripts relating to a fictional kingdom called Glasstown, which the children located at the mouth of the Niger in Africa. Eventually, Emily and Anne split off to form a rival kingdom in the North Pacific known as Gondal. Here they imitated and wove together elements from all of their reading—newspapers and magazines, histories, poetry (including George Gordon, Lord Byron), and fiction (principally Sir Walter Scott)—in a series of interlinked narratives and poems.

Clearly, this was not an unhappy family, despite many adversities, yet there was one impediment to any prospect. Patrick Brontë was fortunate in his rise from humble circumstances to become a gentleman in England, yet he had few financial resources beyond his stipend as perpetual curate at Haworth. Moreover, his income must cease with his demise; and, with a family as large as his, he had no opportunity to save in order to provide a professional or university education for Branwell or dowries for the girls. No doubt from an early age all the children were aware of the fragility of their social and economic standing, and all were driven to a greater or lesser degree to establish some security against their father’s inevitable death. (It was sadly ironic that he was to outlive all of his children by many years.)

Anne’s character seems to have been distinct from a relatively early age. Anecdotes about her as a child show her as tenacious and determined—qualities that were tested later in her service as a governess. As adolescents and young adults, her sisters and brother—whatever the reasons—had difficulty settling upon any situation or project for very long. Branwell in particular drifted from career to career and position to position without success. Anne alone appears to have had the ability to adapt to her circumstances, beginning in 1835, when she was sent to replace Emily at Roe Head School, where Charlotte was serving as a teacher. She stayed until 1837, when illness (perhaps the first active episode of TB infection) forced her return to Haworth.

It was during this illness that she appears to have undergone a spiritual crisis over the nature of salvation. Anne’s religious devotion cannot be doubted—her faith informs almost all of her poetry, which is largely autobiographical, and much of her fiction as well. Anne took from her father (and probably from her Aunt Branwell’s Methodism) a firm evangelical cast of mind, that is, a belief in the immediacy of Christ’s message, a desire to transform one’s whole life into an act of worship, and a commitment to good works. In her illness, she was attended by the Reverend James La Trobe, a Moravian bishop, and probably at this time she adopted (or confirmed) her universalist convictions (shared by Charlotte). This was a belief of universal salvation—in other words, that every soul was potentially capable of good, and that God allowed even the most abject sinner multiple opportunities to repent, to accept Christ, and to be saved.

She was at the time of her leaving Roe Head just about to turn eighteen, but despite her place as the “baby” of the family, she evidently was quite determined to go off and earn her own keep. The family record was not encouraging: At this time, Emily had only recently returned from a short engagement as a governess; Charlotte had several times gone off to teach and come back as well. What was it, then, that drove Anne at this age to seek employment as a governess? Patrick now was sixty-two, quite an elderly man by the standards of the day, and with three daughters and a wayward son in his household, he must have worried ceaselessly about the future. Anne seems to have been gifted (or cursed) with a premature sense of responsibility to her family, no doubt reinforced by her evangelical inclination. Her decision expressed her determination to make her life meaningful in all ways; a life devoted to work not only removed her as a cause of worry to her family but allowed her to do the work of God in the world in her own right.

Her first family (found through a distant connection) were the Inghams of Blake Hall, Mirfield, supposedly the originals of the Bloomfields of
Agnes Grey.
The children, apparently, were both dull and undisciplined, and it would seem that Anne was never given the authority to reign them in; she was summarily dismissed at the end of the year. At home there was, perhaps, the distraction of what may have been affectionate attentions from her father’s curate, William Weightman, though there is now no way to know how serious he might have been or how she may have responded. But even if she were attracted to him, Anne was never one to shirk responsibility: By May 1840 she was on her way to the family of Reverend Edmund Robinson at Thorp Green, near York, where she would remain until the summer of 1845. (In any event, Weightman died suddenly in 1842 without their relations having advanced greatly in the interim.)

At the beginning no happier there than in her first post, over the years Anne seems to have become close to the Robinson children, and she remained in contact with the elder girls even after she left the house. But her last year was clouded by yet another of Branwell’s employment disasters. Her brother had come to Thorp Green as a tutor to the son (presumably on Anne’s recommendation) in January 1843. But by the summer of 1845, Branwell apparently convinced himself that he was in love with Mrs. Robinson and she with him; whether her conduct was in any way at fault remains a mystery. Whatever may or may not have happened between them, he was turned out of the house, and Anne resigned her post. From this time on, she remained at Haworth with Emily and Charlotte, the three watching helplessly as Branwell began his decline into alcoholism and total lethargy.

She must already have commenced writing
Agnes Grey.
She had been writing poetry for many years, at first in connection with the Gondal saga, later (like Emily) more personal lyrics. When Charlotte discovered that her sisters were writing verse in the autumn of 1845, the project was born to publish a joint volume by all three;
Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
(Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, respectively, as they styled themselves pseudonymously) appeared in May 1846, though it was spectacularly unsuccessful in sales. By this time
Agnes Grey
was completed, and the sisters were approaching several publishers serially about three unconnected works of fiction:
Agnes Grey,
Emily’s
Wuthering Heights,
and Charlotte’s
The Professor.
T. C. Newby accepted Emily’s and Anne’s manuscripts, publishing them together as one three-volume work (Anne’s novel was the third volume) in December 1847.
¹
Charlotte’s rejection by Newby turned out to be fortunate, as her “governess” novel,
Jane Eyre,
had already been published by the more prestigious firm Smith, Elder two months earlier.

Coming, as it did, at the tail end of
Wuthering Heights,
Anne’s quiet, spare novel was barely noticed by the critics. Both her sisters’ novels were far more sensational in their choices of subject, and reviewers (many of them hostile) focused mainly on their work. Endless speculation followed about the identity of the Bells: Were they male or female, and were they three or only one? Anne, however, perhaps the most determined to be a professional writer of them all, by now already had made good progress on her new novel,
The Tenant of Wildfell
Hall, with its thoroughly sensational subject. This time, Anne’s work attracted attention in its own right, though much of it (predictably) was unfavorable on moral grounds.

Newby was inherently unreliable, if not an out-and-out scoundrel, and for his own purposes he actively promoted confusion about the identity of the author of
The Tenant
in June 1848, suggesting it was the suddenly famous Currer Bell. George Smith (of Smith, Elder) wrote to the Bells/Brontës that he suspected Currer/Charlotte was playing tricks with him, and so in July, to reassure him, Anne and Charlotte paid him a surprise visit in London. In person they hoped to persuade him that they were indeed two writers and not one; to his credit, Smith responded graciously and generously. This was Anne’s only visit to the metropolis.

Soon after, by early winter, Emily and Anne both were quite ill; Emily refused medical attention (not that any then available would have prolonged her life) and died in December. Then, in January 1849, Anne was given the death sentence—consumption—and from that point on she knew her time left was brief. She rallied just enough in May to make a journey with Charlotte and their closest friend, Ellen Nussey, to Scarborough, where she had spent summer holidays with the Robinsons. There she died on May 28.

 

This outline of Anne Brontë’s life is relevant to our reading of
Agnes Grey
for many reasons, especially because Anne’s own experience as a governess seems to have developed into the subject matter of the novel. From the time of her death—in truth even before—readers have wanted to treat the novel as if it were unvarnished and unmediated autobiography. Her biographers and critics alike have read the novel to explicate the life and have used the life to explicate the novel—a tautological circle that may be interesting but is hardly productive, for the available details of Anne’s working life between 1840 and 1845 are sketchy and almost certainly now never will be further illuminated. What we now know is what we are likely ever to know. More to the point, the biographical dimension to the novel in fact is a serious distraction.
Agnes Grey
portrays the awkward and at times painful situation of the governess—how could it not, given Anne’s life and work—but it goes far beyond mere reportage.

Not that the reportage is unimportant: We look to the Victorian novel (as did so many of its contemporary readers) in part to learn vicariously about the lived experience of people in diverse and interesting circumstances far from our own. And it seems that in the 1840s Victorian readers were interested greatly in the secret lives of governesses. Indeed, governesses were much in the news in the 1840s, with articles in the periodical press, novels devoted to their plight, and the signal event of the foundation of the Governesses Benevolent Institution in 1843 (for no Victorian social problem was really a legitimate problem until a national charitable institution had arisen to solve it). Governesses feature as characters in many novels of the decade, ranging from sweet and noble Ruth Pinch in Charles Dickens’s
Martin Chuzzlewit
to scheming and seductive Becky Sharp in William Makepeace Thackeray’s
Vanity Fair.
We have fictional governesses who are pathetic, incompetent, and passionate. Given all this attention, we remind ourselves that governesses probably numbered some 25,000 at midcentury, but it was not their relatively small numbers that was at issue so much as the almost unimaginable anomaly of their situation.

At a time when a gentleman was defined as a person of no fixed occupation, and when no respectable middle-class woman was ever employed outside the home, the position of the governess was, in class and social terms, a virtual oxy-moron, almost an impossibility. For if, in fact, the governess was a respectable gentlewoman (as she must be if she were to care for one’s children), then she could not be an employee; but since she was working for her own living, she must be an employee and thus could not be a gentlewoman. This was a veritable conundrum.

Thus, how to treat the governess was a constant source of perplexity for the writers of domestic manuals, no doubt reflecting the lived anxiety and confusion of many middle- and upper-class households. Rising prosperity, of course, meant that more families were able to afford governesses but as yet lacked experience in dealing with them, perhaps not knowing even the prevailing wages. For while governesses typically were from good families—proverbially down on their luck either because the father had died or lost his fortune in speculation—their wages classed them with servants. Salaries ranged typically from £15 to £50 a year (though in a very few genteel and elegant establishments perhaps as much as £150). In many if not most households this figure was less than the salary of the housekeeper or a lady’s maid, and perhaps even less than the cook’s. While room and board obviously were included, most governesses were responsible for their own laundry, as well as travel “home” once or twice a year and their clothing; few could have had left more than £20 a year to save or to spend on anything else. This, of course, Anne Brontë knew from her own service. From what she depicts in the novel, she was well aware of the different ways in which a family could make a governess feel ill at ease, and while a governess might achieve a limited independence by supporting herself (barely), few could save or send money home; the only substantive financial benefit to her family would be to remove herself from being a financial burden.