the other Bells, chose “subjects that are peculiarwithout being either probable or pleasing,” some critics lamented. It hardly mattered that
Agnes Grey
was written well; “the injudicious selection of the theme and matter” marred the work. Anne’s tale contained no dark secret or deadly revenge. Instead, its tyranny and cruelty were truer to life. Anne had described everyday behavior in well-to-do households.
Emily Brontë found the raw material for
Wuthering Heights
in her imagination, but Anne drew on her own experience, as Charlotte had done. Her main character, Agnes Grey, comes from a poor but respectable clergyman’s family, and she seeks a post as a governess, like Jane Eyre. Recounting Agnes’s adventures among the families that employ her, Anne revealed much that she had seen and done as governess to the Inghams and Robinsons. Her account sounded so true to life that one reviewer supposed Acton Bell—this man—“must have bribed some governessvery largely, either with love or money, to reveal to him the secrets of her prison-house.”
Also like Jane Eyre, Agnes tells her own story. “How delightful it would beto be a governess! To go out into the world; to enter upon a new life; to act for myself,” Agnes thinks. She wants, too, “to earn my own maintenance, and something to comfort and help my father, mother, and sister.” She finds the governess’s life anything but delightful when she is given charge of three impossible children in the Bloomfield family. Seven-year-old Tom,“the flower of the flock—a generous, noble-spirited boy,” according to his mother, delights in cutting up live birds with his penknife. It shocks Agnes that Tom’s father and uncle encourage this gruesome hobby. Tom and his sisters refuse to obey Agnes, knowing their parents have forbidden her to punish them, while the parents blame Miss Grey for the children’s tantrums and wild behavior. A frustrated Agnes pulls six-year-old Mary Ann’s hair and shakes her violently in a desperate effort to make her cooperate. But these methods of discipline, questionable at best, do no good. The Bloomfields fire Miss Grey before a year has passed.
Agnes Grey struggles with Mary Ann’s hair in this 1922 illustration.
Agnes likes life somewhat better with the second family to employ her, the Murrays of Horton Lodge. Her new pupils include two teenage girls, Rosalie and Matilda. Rosalie is sixteen and pretty, but she thinks only of the impression she makes and the hearts she can conquer. Fourteen-year-old Matilda is a big, active girl who uses rough language and feels most at home in the stable. Mrs. Murray orders the governess to “oblige, instruct, refine,and polish” these girls, or, as Agnes observes, to “render them as superficially attractive and showily accomplished as they could possibly be made.” Securing wealthy husbands is to be their great aim in life.
After her father’s death, Agnes returns home to help her mother run a school. She feels some regret at leaving Rosalie, who has grown close to her, and a new curate, Edward Weston, of whom she is fond. A year later, Agnes returns to the neighborhood of Horton Lodge to visit Rosalie, who is married to the wealthy Sir Thomas Ashby. Rosalie has done what was expected of her. She has a grand home and a baby, but she detests her husband and her life with him. “And as for all the wisdomand goodness you have been trying to instil into me—that is all very right and proper I dare say, and if I were some twenty years older, I might fructify by it,” she admits to Agnes Grey. “But people must enjoy themselves when they are young!”
Agnes tells her readers, “Of course, I pitied herexceedingly, as well for her false idea of happiness and disregard of duty, as for the wretched partner with whom her fate was linked.” In contrast to Rosalie, Agnes earns the love of pious Mr. Weston and the happiness she deserves through virtue and bending of inclination to
Agnes Grey
was written well; “the injudicious selection of the theme and matter” marred the work. Anne’s tale contained no dark secret or deadly revenge. Instead, its tyranny and cruelty were truer to life. Anne had described everyday behavior in well-to-do households.
Emily Brontë found the raw material for
Wuthering Heights
in her imagination, but Anne drew on her own experience, as Charlotte had done. Her main character, Agnes Grey, comes from a poor but respectable clergyman’s family, and she seeks a post as a governess, like Jane Eyre. Recounting Agnes’s adventures among the families that employ her, Anne revealed much that she had seen and done as governess to the Inghams and Robinsons. Her account sounded so true to life that one reviewer supposed Acton Bell—this man—“must have bribed some governessvery largely, either with love or money, to reveal to him the secrets of her prison-house.”
Also like Jane Eyre, Agnes tells her own story. “How delightful it would beto be a governess! To go out into the world; to enter upon a new life; to act for myself,” Agnes thinks. She wants, too, “to earn my own maintenance, and something to comfort and help my father, mother, and sister.” She finds the governess’s life anything but delightful when she is given charge of three impossible children in the Bloomfield family. Seven-year-old Tom,“the flower of the flock—a generous, noble-spirited boy,” according to his mother, delights in cutting up live birds with his penknife. It shocks Agnes that Tom’s father and uncle encourage this gruesome hobby. Tom and his sisters refuse to obey Agnes, knowing their parents have forbidden her to punish them, while the parents blame Miss Grey for the children’s tantrums and wild behavior. A frustrated Agnes pulls six-year-old Mary Ann’s hair and shakes her violently in a desperate effort to make her cooperate. But these methods of discipline, questionable at best, do no good. The Bloomfields fire Miss Grey before a year has passed.
Agnes Grey struggles with Mary Ann’s hair in this 1922 illustration.
Agnes likes life somewhat better with the second family to employ her, the Murrays of Horton Lodge. Her new pupils include two teenage girls, Rosalie and Matilda. Rosalie is sixteen and pretty, but she thinks only of the impression she makes and the hearts she can conquer. Fourteen-year-old Matilda is a big, active girl who uses rough language and feels most at home in the stable. Mrs. Murray orders the governess to “oblige, instruct, refine,and polish” these girls, or, as Agnes observes, to “render them as superficially attractive and showily accomplished as they could possibly be made.” Securing wealthy husbands is to be their great aim in life.
After her father’s death, Agnes returns home to help her mother run a school. She feels some regret at leaving Rosalie, who has grown close to her, and a new curate, Edward Weston, of whom she is fond. A year later, Agnes returns to the neighborhood of Horton Lodge to visit Rosalie, who is married to the wealthy Sir Thomas Ashby. Rosalie has done what was expected of her. She has a grand home and a baby, but she detests her husband and her life with him. “And as for all the wisdomand goodness you have been trying to instil into me—that is all very right and proper I dare say, and if I were some twenty years older, I might fructify by it,” she admits to Agnes Grey. “But people must enjoy themselves when they are young!”
Agnes tells her readers, “Of course, I pitied herexceedingly, as well for her false idea of happiness and disregard of duty, as for the wretched partner with whom her fate was linked.” In contrast to Rosalie, Agnes earns the love of pious Mr. Weston and the happiness she deserves through virtue and bending of inclination to
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