Anne Brontë’s autobiographical novel about a young woman governess features themes of social injustice, class consciousness, education, and isolation. Brontë’s first-person narrative alerts readers in its opening sentence that, by presenting a “history,” it intends to instruct and will be DIDACTIC. That instructive history concerns Agnes Grey, a 19-year-old girl who describes two miserable experiences serving unlikable and overly demanding families as a governess. She makes clear that the unsatisfying nature of those positions results from support of an unfair CLASS STRUCTURE on the part of her employers, who treat her as something even less than a servant. Nothing subtle exists in the narration as Brontë shapes thoroughly unlikable characters to represent the wealthy class.

Like Anne Brontë, Agnes herself comes from a loving family in which the father is a poor clergyman. Because Agnes’s once-wealthy mother had disobeyed her parents and married for love “below her station,” she receives no parental financial support to help relieve the family’s poverty. Her husband’s dreams for his family cannot be realized because of his low income. Their poor situation is further exacerbated by the loss of what small investment he has to a scheme literally sunk by the unfortunate death of its manager, who plunges, along with his investment capital, to the bottom of a stormy sea. However poor the family may be, they are a loving and supportive group, and Brontë shows that, contrary to societal views, privilege does not automatically constitute morality or lead to happiness. Agnes demonstrates that misperception when she freely contrasts her family’s devotion and unqualified love for one another with the loathing and recrimination evident in the two families she serves. Her character will come into conflict with her class-conscious environment, individuals who support that environment, and even herself during her struggle to fit into that environment.

When Agnes leaves her family in an attempt to contribute income by working as a governess, she sorely misses her parents and sister and finds no affection with her first family, the Bloomfields. With no help from parents who believe their children to be paragons of talent and virtue, Agnes must deal with overly indulged and recalcitrant charges she can hardly control, much less teach. She must depart after only a few months because she cannot instruct children who lack respect for others, an attitude they directly inherited from their snobby and disdainful parents. The reader understands that those adults have little cause for their feelings of superiority as Brontë illustrates the injustice in such attitudes. In one of the only roles available to “common” women, the governess must suffer the dual indignities of rejection and humiliation at the hands of mere children. Such disrespectful treatment far outweighs any physical suffering that results for Agnes from poverty.

In her second position with the Murray family at an estate called Horton Lodge, Agnes must teach, and serve as companion for, two young women. While more tolerable than her previous charges, the girls are spoiled and materialistic, and have little in common with Agnes. Although again unfulfilled by her governess position and stymied by the social and ideological barriers to close friendship with the Murray girls, Agnes finds her loneliness tolerable due to her occasional meetings with the local curate, Edward Weston. Like her author sisters, Charlotte BRONTË and Emily BRONTË, Anne Brontë emphasized the importance of nature in her writings, and in one scene, she equates the joy evoked in the governess by nature with that evoked by Weston’s presence. When Agnes, walking with her charges that outdistance her, hears “the sweet song of the happy lark,” her “misanthropy” dissolves, and she is reminded of her happy childhood. She longs for a plant to remind her of her early days on the moors, but knows she will not find any such thing in the area of the estate that serves as her temporary home. She discovers three primroses she wants to gather and carry away as a reminder of the world’s beauty, but they sit out of reach on a high bank. Weston arrives on the scene and offers to pick the flowers for Agnes, a symbolic act that foreshadows their eventual union. As they discuss the flowers they prefer, Agnes remarks that her favorites are wildflowers, implying that she herself is an example of something wild and out-of-place among the more cultured women at Horton Lodge.

When the older Murray girl marries and Agnes’s father dies, Agnes returns home to start a school with her mother. She fears she will never see Weston again, but he later appears and proposes marriage, which Agnes happily accepts. Brontë makes clear the admirable goals of the working class when she concludes her novel by writing, “[O]ur modest income is amply sufficient for our requirements: and by practicing the economy we learnt in harder times, and never attempting to imitate our richer neighbours, we manage not only to enjoy comfort and contentment, but to have every year something to lay by for our children, and something to give to those who need it.”

Anne Brontë’s first novel represents the movement away from the “social” or “aristocratic” novel, so popular in the 1830s, to the novel that focused on a “lower life,” and the realistic heroism of work, in the 1840s. Based on her own unhappy experience as a governess for nearly five years, the novel illustrates Brontë’s frustration over the limited vocations available to Victorian-era women and the attitudes of those who made unrealistic demands upon the working class. The novel did not prove as successful as Anne Brontë’s second novel, The TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL (1848). The first publication, printed in London by T. C. Newby, contained several errors, which the 1850 edition would correct. Published by Smith, Elder & Company, the later edition appeared posthumously and was closely edited by Charlotte Brontë.

Agnes Grey is often considered the weakest of the seven novels produced by the three Brontë sisters. A lack of command over her materials is the most common criticism of Anne’s writing, in addition to plot contrivances that seem too convenient. For a novel that purports to be realistic, this one allows its narrator frequent flights into a fancy that complicate her handling of her duties, and its conclusion with her “rescue” by Weston subverts Agnes’s attainment of any true epiphany, undercutting a satisfying resolution to the conflict faced in the world of work by Agnes. Its greatest value may be that it provided Anne a complement to her sister Charlotte’s JANE EYRE (1847), another governess tale, published in the same year.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bell, A. Craig. The Novels of Anne Brontë: A Study and Reappraisal. Braunton, Devlin, U.K.: Merlin Books, 1992.
Nash, Julie, and Barbara A. Suess, eds. New Approaches to the Literary Art of Anne Brontë. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2001.