Agnes Grey (34 page)

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on Anne Bronte’s Agnes Grey, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. In reviews contemporaneous with the 1847 publication of Agnes Grey and
Wuthering Heights,
it is evident that Anne’s work was in many ways eclipsed by her sister Emily’s wildly original novel as well as Charlotte’s
Jane Eyre,
not to mention the mystery of authorship surrounding the “Bells. ”Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter
Agnes Grey
through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

Of Agnes
Grey,
much need not be said, further than this, that it is the autobiography of a young lady during the time she was a governess in two different families; neither of which is a favourable specimen of the advantages of home education. We do not actually assert that the author must have been a governess himself, to describe as he does the minute torments and incessant tediums of her life, but he must have bribed some governess very largely, either with love or money, to reveal to him the secrets of her prison-house, or, he must have devoted extraordinary powers of observation and discovery to the elucidation of the subject. In either case, Agnes
Grey
is a tale well worth the writing and the reading. The heroine is a sort of younger sister to
Jane Eyre,
but inferior to her in every way.

—January 15, 1848

Agnes Grey ...
is a tale of every day life, and though not wholly free from exaggeration (there are some detestable young ladies in it), does not offend by any startling improbabilities. It is more level and more sunny. Perhaps we shall best describe it as a somewhat coarse imitation of one of Miss Austen’s charming stories. Like
Jane Eyre,
it sets forth some passages in the life of a governess; but the incidents, wound up with the heroine’s marriage to a country clergyman, are such as might happen to anyone in that situation of life, and, doubtless, have happened to many. There is a want of distinctness in the character of Agnes, which prevents the reader from taking much interest in her fate—but the story, though lacking the power and originality of
Wuthering Heights,
is infinitely more agreeable. It leaves no painful impression on the mind—some may think it leaves no impression at all. We are not quite sure that the next new novel will not efface it,
but Jane Eyre
and
Wuthering Heights
are not things to be forgotten.

—January 22, 1848

It can scarcely be doubted that Anne Brontë’s two novels,
Agnes
Grey and
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,
would have long since fallen into oblivion but for the inevitable association with the romances of her two greater sisters. While this may be taken for granted, it is impossible not to feel, even at the distance of more than half a century, a sense of Anne’s personal charm. Gentleness is a word always associated with her by those who knew her. When Mr. Nicholls saw what professed to be a portrait of Anne in a magazine article, he wrote: “What an awful caricature of the dear, gentle Anne Brontë!” Mr. Nicholls had a portrait of Anne in his possession, drawn by Charlotte, which he pronounced to be an admirable likeness and this does convey the impression of a sweet and gentle nature.

—from
Charlotte Brontë and Her Circle
(1896)

Anne Brontë serves a twofold purpose in the study of what the Brontës wrote and were. In the first place, her gentle and delicate presence, her sad, short story, her hard life and early death, enter deeply into the poetry and tragedy that have always been entwined with the memory of the Brontës, as women and as writers; in the second, the books and poems that she wrote serve as matter of comparison by which to test the greatness of her two sisters. She is the measure of their genius—like them, yet not with them....

But Anne was not strong enough, her gift was not vigorous enough, to enable her thus to transmute experience and grief. The probability is that when she left Thorp Green in 1845 she was already suffering from that religious melancholy of which Charlotte discovered such piteous evidence among her papers after death. It did not much affect the writing of
Agnes Grey,
which was completed in 1846, and reflected the minor pains and discomforts of her teaching experience, but it combined with the spectacle of Branwell’s increasing moral and physical decay to produce that bitter mandate of conscience under which she wrote
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

—from her preface to
The Life and Works of Charlotte Brontë and Her Sisters
(1899-1900)

Agnes
Grey is a prose narrative simple and beautiful as a muslin dress.... When Agnes begins to tell us of her charges and their vulgar parents, we know that we are reading a master-piece. Nothing short of genius could have set them before us so plainly and yet with restraint—even the incident of the little boy who tears a bird’s nest out of some bushes and fixes fish hooks into the beaks of the young birds so that he may drag them about the stable-yard. Agnes’s reprimands, too, are low in tone, yet sufficient to bring her into conflict with the little boy’s mother, who thinks that her son’s amusement should not be interfered with. The story was written, probably, when Anne Brontë was but two or three and twenty, and it is the one story in English literature in which style, characters, and subject are in perfect keeping.

—from
Conversations in Ebury Street
(1924)

1. “It is foolish to wish for beauty. Sensible people never either desire it for themselves or care about it in others,” says Agnes Grey. Would you say these lines were written by Brontë to characterize Agnes, or do they sound to you like a message Brontë wants to communicate to the reader? Do you agree with this sentiment?

2. Do you feel that the religious concerns of Agnes Grey get in the way—or do they add something of importance?

3. Compare the situation of Agnes with that of a modern nanny. Who is worse off?—and not just financially?

4. What changes would you make if you were offered a lot of money to turn this novel into a comedy?

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