Comments & Questions

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.

COMMENTS

Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper

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

Atlas

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

Clement K. Shorter

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)

Mary Ward

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)

George Moore

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)

QUESTIONS

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?

For Further Reading

BIOGRAPHY

Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.

Barker, Juliet, comp. The Brontës: A Life in Letters. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1998.

Bentley, Phyllis. The Brontës and Their World. New York: Viking Press, 1969.

Gérin, Winifred. Anne Brontë. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1959.

Langland, Elizabeth. Anne Brontë: The Other One. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1989.

Ratchford, Fannie. The Brontës’ Web of Childhood. New York: Columbia University Press, 1941.

Spark, Muriel, ed. The Letters of the Brontës. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954.

Winnifrith, Tom. The Brontës and Their Background: Romance and Reality. London: Macmillan, 1973.

CRITICISM

Alexander, Christine, and Jane Sellars. The Art of the Brontës. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Alexander, Christine, and Margaret Smith, eds. The Oxford Companion to the Brontës. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Allott, Miriam, ed. The Brontës: The Critical Heritage. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974.

Brontë, Anne. The Poems of Anne Brontë. Edited by Edward Chitham. London: Macmillan, 1979.

Craik, W. A. The Brontë Novels. London: Methuen, 1968.

Eagleton, Terry. Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës. London: Macmillan, 1975.

Ewbank, Inga-Stina. Their Proper Sphere: A Study of the Brontë Sisters as Early-Victorian Female Novelists. London: Edward Arnold, 1966.

Gregor, Ian, comp. The Brontës: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970.

Miller, Lucasta. The Brontë Myth. London: Jonathan Cape, 2001.

Nash, Julie, and Barbara A. Suess, eds. New Approaches to the Literary Art of Anne Brontë. Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001.

a

Someone recently returned to England after making a fortune in India.

b

It was common in Victorian novels to replace actual place names with a dash; in this case, Brontë drops hints that the village is in Yorkshire.

c

In effect, a charge account; it was common for tradesmen to allow wealthier clients to run up bills and settle them periodically.

d

Light four-wheeled carriage suitable to be pulled by one horse.

e

That is, painfully; this variant is not recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary, but it appears twice in the novel, suggesting it is a local pronunciation.

f

Seaside resort; the fresh sea air was believed to have medicinal effects.

g

A good bit (of rain).

h

Obligingly.

i

Agnes, like the Brontës, seems to expect that the main meal of the day will be taken early, at one o’clock, as was the country style. Tea would be the usual late-evening meal, probably served to the children at around six; when Mr. Bloomfield is away, the family does not dine formally in the evening.

j

The household staff had dined (as they would have expected) on the joint after it had come back from the table, presumably carving it in a manner that annoyed Mr. Bloomfield.

k

Lady’s maid (as in one who assists with “attire”).

l

Probably alluding to line 22 of William Wordsworth’s poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (1804).

m

Portable, folding writing desk, usually containing letters, paper, ink, and pens.

n

Mythical monster whose glare turned to stone all who looked upon her.

o

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 625