Reading Time: 5-10 mins
Happy 2022! As written over on Ko-fi, I’ve set myself a new goal: to write more reviews. So, here goes.
I’m starting with Agnes Grey. Having escaped lockdown through nineteenth-century literature, I’ve already enthused about certain aspects of Anne Brontë’s first novel. Now, with this week being the 202nd anniversary of her birth, it’s time to look at it as a whole.
The Plot
When clergyman Richard Grey loses his life savings in a shipwreck, he sinks into despair. It falls to the rest of his family to keep the household afloat. Alice, his ever-efficient wife, manages the lot, while Mary, the elder daughter, creates paintings to sell, but all are over-protective when Agnes wishes to do her bit. While she is the youngest, she is also eighteen, and soon insists on becoming a governess.
Unfortunately, she struggles with this line of work. There’s a scene in the film Hampstead, I think (it’s been a while since I saw it), where a charity shop worker is asked, by a busy customer, to watch her child (despite childcare not being the, er, charity shop worker’s job). The child proceeds to pull clothes from the rack. The charity shop worker ties the child’s reins to her desk so it doesn’t happen again. The child is not hurt. The busy customer returns and gets angry in a how-dare-you-tie-up-my-child sort of way.
It’s relevant because these are the kinds of families Agnes works for – with worse behaviours than chucking shirts on a reasonably clean floor. The Bloomfield children are almost impossible to control, gleefully destroying her possessions and torturing the garden birds. Leaving them, she joins the Murray household. One of their sons wipes his hands on his mother’s dress – while she’s wearing it – after eating; Rosalie, his teenage sister, deliberately leads her suitors on, just so she can break their hearts.
Both atmospheres are hostile to Agnes’s wellbeing – until a kind new curate, Edward Weston, arrives. She soon falls in love with him – but with more changes displacing the Grey family, and Rosalie’s ongoing machinations, can she see him often enough to develop their friendship? Can he possibly feel the same way?
With little chance, she feels, of experiencing such mutual romantic love, Agnes puts her focus on the love she already has: that of her family. They then achieve financial independence – but can she be satisfied with gaining everything she needs to survive, when her feelings are elsewhere?
The Style
Anne Brontë has had a historical reputation of being a lesser writer, compared to her sisters. Nowadays, this reputation depends on which readers you ask! Personally, I would agree that Agnes Grey is not the best of the Brontë canon. Its sentences, for example, can read as clunky compared to Jane Eyre’s almost poetic flow – still, I adored reading it.
It’s not bad, either. Jane Eyre was Charlotte’s second-written novel, and completed after Agnes Grey, Anne’s first. While both sisters had terrible experiences as governesses, it’s interesting to see their different takes on it in fiction. Always supported and eventually loved by her employer’s household, Jane experiences the fairy tale; often ignored and under-appreciated, Agnes faces the grim reality.
(Also, in this rather bittersweet novel, Anne lays the groundwork for the next – particularly, after Rosalie’s fate, the upper-class marriage market of the time. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a tougher read. It’s a breathtaking look at the unique pain felt when morally compelled to help someone who needs help, but doesn’t want it – because, in this case, he’s an overindulged narcissist. In writing this blog post, I’m telling anyone who’ll listen how much I love Agnes Grey, but The Tenant of Wildfell Hall improves on its themes.)
This difference is one reason for Anne’s lesser reputation. When we hear of the Brontës, we think of Victorian gothic love stories. This is, er, broadly true of their most famous works – Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – but Anne took these influences in a noticeably different direction. Her work tends towards satire and realism, more the realms of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens.
In a letter to G.H. Lewes, Charlotte Brontë once claimed never to have read Austen’s works. She would, however, surely have known of them – Branwell used ‘Northangerland’ as a pseudonym – and so the same can be said of Anne. Looking over Agnes Grey, I’d be surprised if Anne hadn’t gone one step further and actually read them. The 2020 film Emma. opens with a young, privileged blonde lady’s governess marrying a good man called Weston (played – slightly disconcertingly, considering The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’s screen history – by Rupert Graves).
And so, part of Agnes Grey may have been born. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall includes almost an entire village of Austen-style busybodies – but where Jane’s quick wit reduces, for example, Pride and Prejudice’s Mr Collins to a level of harmless cringe, the more serious Anne was disgusted by what was happening around her. The resulting bitter humour in her writing is, essentially, throwing shade.
The Characters
This sharper, mocking irony is closer to Dickens. He used caricature to sketch out society’s faults, but sometimes this makes characters a bit OTT for me, though still complex and gloriously memorable.
Here, Anne is again different. Characterisation is my favourite part of her writing, because it rings so true for me. I was in education with a teasing Fergus Markham and wispy Millicent Hargrave (both from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall). I’ve seen the fake friendliness Rosalie offers Agnes in their novel… nothing on the surface suggests they’re not true friends, but something doesn’t feel right, a gut instinct that turns out to be correct.
Anne also brings this life into her settings, using precise sensory detail to recreate, for example, early morning on a nineteenth-century Scarborough-esque beach.
She just keeps surprising me. I know I have a lifetime of reading period fiction ahead of me, but I haven’t yet found another such book where a teenage tomboy is extremely grumpy and delights in swearing at everyone… literally the closest I can think of is on TV: Susanna from Upstart Crow (though Matilda isn’t quite as nice, underneath it all).
Then, there’s Richard, so obviously suffering from depressive illness. Alice twice ditches her snob of a father for love of the Greys; she has a great line about her daughters’ future husbands. Their own love story is rather sweet.
Anne’s best talent for surprise, however, is how she writes violence. Again, we’re far from Jane Austen territory, here. In another downside to this book, we don’t really get a scene explaining why Agnes likes children (her motivation for choosing governess work). Sometimes, it seems more that she doesn’t like them at all: Agnes completely loses it with the Bloomfield’s daughter, shaking her and pulling her hair.
This soon stops, thank goodness, because Mary Ann starts screaming, but there’s no getting away from the shock. We’re right there with Agnes when she mercy-kills Tom Bloomfield’s trapped garden birds, saving them from his torture.
Instead, the book becomes a critique on the disasters that happen when people aren’t properly prepared. There’s no teacher training in this historical era, nor do either set of employer-parents welcome Agnes in the way she’s used to, having grown up with her mother’s much friendlier example.
Perhaps because of this, Agnes snaps in the way that she does. She then spends most of her novel in self-doubt. Restless at home, she was so eager to join in with the wider world… only to be isolated by every major character outside her family – except one.
Edward Weston is yet another surprise. This time, it’s his role here – as love interest – compared to corresponding characters in the family canon. He’s not going to assault his apparent love rival on a deserted road and leave him there (but then return, out of remorse). He wouldn’t lie to his much younger fiancée, even when desperate, or charm another (who’s more his age) into an abusive marriage. Instead, he’s rather… reticent, but lives out his faith as it’s meant to be: with love.
So, Weston is a ‘good guy’, trope-wise, who really is a good man. Because of this, much of the plot’s romantic drama instead suffers from what, despite Agnes Grey predating Bleak House by about five years, I’m going ahead and calling ‘Allan Woodcourt Syndrome’. Firstly, we don’t see a lot of him, considering that he is the love interest – but then, neither novel’s main genre is romance.
Secondly, he underestimates the level of doubt our protagonist has, re his feelings for her. With mostly career duties keeping them apart, Agnes spends a lot of time emotionally torturing herself. Implicitly, we guess Weston’s own loneliness and doubts. It’s all quite heartbreaking to read.
By the end, however, both have escaped their frustrating jobs, gaining the freedom to work for themselves – but is that enough to be truly happy? Agnes Grey is often a bitter novel. Can its ending be sweet?
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E.A. Colquitt 