SOURCE: "Agnes Grey: Accommodating Reality," in Anne Brontë: A New Critical Assessment, Vision Press Limited, 1983, pp. 9-44.

[In the following essay, Scott evaluates the realism, theme, style, and contemporary relevance of Agnes Grey, acknowledging the work's simplicity and brevity but seeing these as among its strengths.]

Agnes Grey has three principal purposes: a paedogogic one; a protest against tyranny; and an attempt to reconcile the passionate yearning heart with life's realities, with its actual possibilities.

We underrate the novel if its brevity and simplicity of construction cause us to think the handling of these themes is slight.

As a story it is simple enough. The eponymous young heroine, who narrates the whole, grows up in a good-natured loving North of England family, the daughter of a clergyman, who loses on a business speculation even the 'snug little property of his own' which has amplified hitherto their modest circumstances. As well as making drastic retrenchment the family now considers ways and means of supplementing his meagre stipend. Mrs. Grey suggests to the older of her two surviving children Mary the drawing of pictures for sale. Agnes herself volunteers to become a governess and after much opposition from the other members of the household carries her point.

At last, to my great joy, it was decreed that I should take charge of the young family of a certain Mrs. Bloomfield; whom my kind, prim aunt Grey had known in her youth, and asserted to be a very nice woman. Her husband was a retired tradesman, who had realised a very comfortable fortune; but could not be prevailed upon to give a greater salary than twenty-five pounds to the instructress of his children. I, however, was glad to accept this, rather than refuse the situation—which my parents were inclined to think the better plan.

After a long cold journey in the middle of the succeeding September, she arrives at the Bloomfields' mansion Wellwood only to discover chilly hospitality from the mistress of the house and that its children are undisciplined cruel egotists. Tom (aged 7), Mary Ann (almost 6) and Fanny (almost 4 on their new preceptress's coming) are her charges and heavy work they make for her. The parents expect Agnes Grey to keep these artful savages in order, having themselves indulged them all along and continuing to impose no settled course of restraints and encouragements of their own.

Tom indeed has the most barbarous instincts towards animals, and retails 'a list of torments' he intends to inflict upon 'a brood of little callow nestlings' which he has just filched from a neighbouring plantation, but

while he was busied in the relation, I dropped the stone upon his intended victims and crushed them flat beneath it. Loud were the outcries, terrible the excerations, consequent upon this daring outrage… .

But soon my trials in this quarter came to a close— sooner than I either expected or desired; for one sweet evening towards the close of May, as I was rejoicing in the near approach of the holidays, and congratulating myself upon having made some progress with my pupils (as far as their learning went at least, for I had instilled something into their heads, and I had at length brought them to be a little—a very little—more rational about getting their lessons done in time to leave some space for recreation, instead of tormenting themselves and me all day long to no purpose), Mrs. Bloomfield sent for me, and calmly told me that after Midsummer my services would be no longer required. She assured me that my character and general conduct were unexceptionable; but the children had made so little improvement since my arrival, that Mr. Bloomfield and she felt it their duty to seek some other mode of instruction. Though superior to most children of their years in abilities, they were decidedly behind them in attainments: their manners were uncultivated, and their tempers unruly. And this she attributed to a want of sufficient firmness, and diligent, persevering care on my part. (Ch. 5)

This failure Agnes actually finds disappointing, but with fresh hope she sets out on another governessemployment, gained by placing an advertisement of her qualifications in the newspapers. It takes her (at £50 a year) to

the family of Mr. Murray, of Horton Lodge, near O——, about seventy miles from our village: a formidable distance to me, as I had never been above twenty miles from home in all the course of my twenty years' sojourn on earth; and as, moreover, every individual in that family and in the neighbourhood was utterly unknown to myself and all my acquaintances. But this rendered it only the more piquant to me.

It turns out, however, that Horton Lodge is far from being a sanctuary of sweetness and light. Here again her employers have a very limited sense of her identity and needs as a human being. Mr. Murray is largely absent from her purview, a blusterous redfaced portly country gent. His wife is a giddy social butterfly, chiefly concerned, in the later phases of the story, about making 'good' matches for her two daughters—at whatever such trifling cost as matrimonial misery.

These girls and their brothers also, like the Bloomfields, have been 'outrageously spoiled', so that 'Master Charles … his mother's peculiar darling … was … only active in doing mischief, and only clever in inventing falsehoods: not simply to hide his faults, but, in mere malicious wantonness, to bring odium upon others.' However, of both boys' instruction and management the new governess is delivered twelve months after her arrival by the dispatch of the younger to follow his brother at a boarding school.

At all times and seasons the youngsters torment Miss Grey with their selfish irrational conduct, and by all the family her convenience or comfort is never consulted. Likewise the local squirearchy never speaks to her or takes any notice of her existence and in Mr. Hatfield, the vicar of the parish, Anne Brontë satirizes much that she despised and hated in the Established Church of her days—among other things, the alternation between sermons 'sunless and severe' and ingratiation of wealthy parishioners. Yet Agnes is comforted to note how the new curate, Mr. Edward Weston, nowise resembles him.

Meanwhile she receives a blow-by-blow account from day to day of the intrigues in cynical flirtation, and for heartless marriage, on the part of her elder charge Rosalie Murray, who aims at rich wedlock to a baronet while teasing both the parson and Harry Meltham, a younger son of the local hall.

Visiting one Nancy Brown, an elderly pauper of the village, who, as well as by physical disablement has been 'somewhat afflicted with religious melancholy' (Ch. 11), Agnes has learned of Mr. Weston's good offices as a comforting pastor in this household of hidden suffering. And indeed she finds that the new young curate, not specially winsome in his ways or of his person as he is, has done like offices in other poor homes, including material help:

'Just for all the world!' exclaimed his [a poor consumptive labourer's] wife; 'an about a three wik sin', when he seed how poor Jem shivered wi' cold, an' what pitiful fires we kept, he axed if wer stock of coals was nearly done. I telled him it was, an' we was ill set to get more: but you know, mum, I didn't think o' him helping us; but howsever, he sent us a sack o' coals next day; an' we've had good fires ever sin: an' a great blessing it is, this winter time. But that's his way, Miss Grey: when he comes into a poor body's house a seein' sick folk, he like notices what they most stand i'need on; an' if he thinks they can't readily get it therseln, he never says nowt about it, but just gets it for 'em. An' it isn't everybody 'at 'ud do that, 'at has as little as he has: for you know, mum, he's now't at all to live on but what he gets fra' th' rector, an' that's little enough, they say.'

It comes as all the harder to bear for the plain governess (as she deems herself) when Rosalie Murray with her very real beauty and charm exercises the idle prenuptial time of her espousal to Sir Thomas Ashby in attempting to engage the curate's affections as well; since by then Agnes has thoroughly fallen in love with Mr. Weston and highly esteems his quiet virtue, strength of character, courage and independence of spirit.

This last quality appears uppermost, for all that Weston has occasionally taken the opportunity of walking with, talking to Miss Grey and plucking flowers for her, when he bears very calmly the news of her departure from Horton following the death of her father back at home and the resolution there taken by mother and daughter to hire and conduct a ladies' seminary in a coastal resort at the other side of the country. (Her sister Mary is by now married to a poor person of her own.)

As the weeks pass with no further word coming from him, Agnes abandons the faint hope raised by his last question ("'It is possible we may meet again," said he; "will it be of any consequence to you whether we do or not?"'); and she accepts the erewhile Rosalie Murray's invitation to stay at Ashby Park. There she observes the beginning of a life of married unhappiness which exhibits a new pathos in the bride's fate, even as or though that young woman herself is bored with her infant child.

Back at the watering-place which is now scene of both home and work to her, Agnes goes one summer morning early for 'a solitary ramble on the sands while half the world was in bed'. Here she encounters Weston again and it turns out he 'never could discover' her address, that he has lately been installed in a living only two miles distant. He visits her and her mother from now on regularly, and one evening taking her for a walk towards a cliff with a magnificent sea-view, he proposes.

With their marriage and a restrospective summary of their happiness over subsequent years, as co-workers in the church and as parents of three children no less than as partners, the tale concludes.

Stated like that the story is bald and bare to the point of banality; and indeed the anticlimactic mood or effect of its closing phase is something which deserves attention. But two things give the whole a solidity and value quite out of the run-of-the-mill. First, the substantiality of its heroine's nature, which is mediated to us by the quality of her language as narrator. And second, deriving from this, the amount of ground the book covers in its brief compass.

Ars est celare artem. A wholly perspicuous literary style is one of the highest attainments, whether conscious or 'given', of a writer. To create a complete picture of a living world 'out there' in front of your readers by linguistic means of which they are unaware or rendered unobservant—well, the power to do that inheres only in a few classics, let alone lesser works. Some great authors are justly valued for the idiosyncrasy of their style: a chief value in reading them is contact with the highly individual voice which their pages offer—say those of Sir Thomas Browne or Jeremy Taylor, Marcel Proust or the later Henry James. But the other, the 'quiet thing', is much more difficult of achievement.

Anne Brontë's narrative manner operates like a transparent pane of glass. We stare straight through it at the subjects under consideration.

All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity, that the dry, shrivelled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut. Whether this be the case with my history or not, I am hardly competent to judge. I sometimes think that it might prove useful to some, and entertaining to others; but the world may judge for itself. Shielded by my own obscurity, and by the lapse of years, and a few fictitious names, I do not fear to venture; and will candidly lay before the public what I would not disclose to the most intimate friend.

Thus the very opening of the novel.

This is not hemming and hawing, a proemial warmingup which, for all the good it does, could just as well be cut. We need to be supplied with a motive for what follows—for why is Agnes Grey telling her story? Yet we don't want a prologomenon which testifies to nothing so much as its author's self-importance with either blatant arrogance or coy pseudo-apology; and neither type of effusion is here traceable.

The narrative is confessedly offered as having a didactic drift and potential moralistic value, but in a direct quiet manner which is self-conscious in all the right ways and none of the wrong ones. To this the absence of any turgid lumbering in the style testifies; indeed negatives will characterize the best terms of our praise for this side of Anne Brontë's accomplishment, and just because it is so thoroughly accomplished. Those first four sentences are paced so as to move with a light various rhythm; but not to draw attention to themselves as so doing. Though their declared focus is the historian herself we have already become unconscious, by the end of that short paragraph, of a mind behind it manipulating a rhetoric.

As we drove along, my spirits revived again, and I turned, with pleasure, to the contemplation of the new life upon which I was entering. But though it was not far past the middle of September, the heavy clouds and strong north-easterly wind combined to render the day extremely cold and dreary; and the journey seemed a very long one, for, as Smith observed, the roads were 'very heavy'; and certainly, his horse was very heavy too: it crawled up the hills, and crept down them, and only condescended to shake its sides in a trot where the road was at a dead level or a very gentle slope, which was rarely the case in those rugged regions; so that it was nearly one o'clock before we reached the place of our destination. Yet, after all, when we entered the lofty iron gateway, when we drove softly up the smooth, well-rolled carriage road, with the green lawn on each side, studded with young trees, and approached the new but stately mansion of Wellwood, rising above its mushroom poplar-groves, my heart failed me, and I wished it were a mile or two farther off. For the first time in my life, I must stand alone: there was no retreating now. I must enter that house, and introduce myself among its strange inhabitants. But how was it to be done? True, I was near nineteen; but, thanks to my retired life and the protecting care of my mother and sister, I well knew that many a girl of fifteen, or under, was gifted with a more womanly address, and greater ease and self-possession, than I was. Yet, if Mrs. Bloomfield were a kind, motherly woman, I might do very well, after all; and the children, of course, I should soon be at ease with them—and Mr. Bloomfield, I hoped, I should have but little to do with. (The opening of Ch. 2)

The balance here of narrative, description, commentary and self-revelation is very finely judged. We move without effort from the young appointee's inward musings to the exterior scene, first in its totality and then particulars—as her new place of work swings into view; then back again to the interior ponderings which have now (at the crisis of the journey as it were) become self-examination. Look how different the devices are which make actual to us the horse's gait, the pace of the journey, on the one hand, and on the other the effect of the whole new Wellwood topography upon its present recruit's eye and spirit. 'Condescended to shake its sides in a trot' is a lovely mimesis, full of close observation and gentle irony where the paratactic sentence with a very simple structure of clauses also conveys the laboured progress the travellers enjoy. Which is immediately followed by the rather breathless rhythm of the prose at the entrance to the grounds of Agnes's new abode:

(1) Yet, (after all) …
(2) when we entered …
(2a) when we drove …
(2a/i) with the green lawn …
(2a/iA) studded with young trees,
(3) and approached
(3a) rising above …

The dependency of these numerous clauses one upon another, the accumulation of them before the wave of the sentence breaks at 'my heart failed me' (its main verb), well conveys the rising apprehension, even to panic, of the new arrival.

We move at once into quick erlebte Rede:

For the first time in my life, I must stand alone: there was no retreating now. I must enter that house, and introduce myself among its strange inhabitants. But how was it to be done?

At the remove of only one tense this is her self-address of the actual historical moment; provoking in its turn a reflection on her general situation, her identity as a social being altogether, in the more relaxed amplitude of which we are given two points of view: the young woman's, little more than a girl, to whom all this happened at the original time, and that of the more experienced judicious narrator of after years who is telling her tale. ('True, I was near nineteen, etc …')

This very fluency of representational competence all but matches Dickens's art on like occasions in his first-person-told Bildungsromane, David Copperfield and Great Expectations; so that there seeps into our subconscious the conviction that a narrator, who has speech and there-fore life itself so much under her hand and is such a true reflector of the world, possesses in herself a human value which makes important the novel's trajectory of its old theme, innocence passing through experience. The duality of vision—the older Agnes mediates to us the experiences of her younger self—is in the main handled with secure success. There are, at least for me, only a couple of instances where uncertainty obtrudes. Is there a cringing kittenishness in the heroine's speech and attitude during the second half of Chapter 1 ? Is it that, recording the same, the novelist is using the quietly ironic eye she deploys upon other human weakness in her pages? Or is it simply truthful psychological portraiture; is this exactly how her heroine would speak and move, in consequence of a life spent hitherto in greatly sheltered innocence? We may be the more wary of censuring this first of such 'lapses', if that is what they be, given the truly virile range and variety of tone—the moral insight and control—in the paragraphs preceding it.

Likewise with a certain moment in Chapter 11:

One bright day in the last week of February, I was walking in the park, enjoying the threefold luxury of solitude, a book, and pleasant weather; for Miss Matilda had set out on her daily ride, and Miss Murray was gone in the carriage with her mamma to pay some morning calls. But it struck me that I ought to leave these selfish pleasures, and the park with its glorious canopy of bright blue sky, the west wind sounding through its yet leafless branches, the snow-wreaths still lingering in its hollows, but melting fast beneath the sun, and the graceful deer browsing on its moist herbage already assuming the freshness and verdure of spring—and go to the cottage of one Nancy Brown, a widow, whose son was at work all day in the fields, and who was afflicted with an inflammation in the eyes… .

The governess here strikes me as being somewhat—and the least bit disagreeably—'pi'. Such pleasures as appreciating Nature's glories are not 'selfish' but of themselves wholesome; at least, in a life not given up to indulgence and sloth, which anyway has few enjoyments or releases in it. There is arguably a kind of embarrassment on the narrator's part herself communicated to us in the way the sentence that conveys the new resolution to visit the cottager is worked up with a lengthy subordination of clauses, to end so (as it were) consciously in bathos (indicated no less with the hyphenation which introduces the closing cadences). Perhaps this is again simple psychological fidelity on Anne Brontë's part: at a time when her personality is under assault from various angles, Agnes Grey is attempting to shore it up and find refuge in deliberate self-conscious rectitude. Her problem at Horton Lodge is that everything there constitutes a continual raid on her self-esteem. We may be offered here, archly from the narrator's view, a glimpse of her method for compensation. But we are not sure. The tale as a whole is not told in a mode, like Jane Austen's, which alerts us all the time to the smallest nuances of tone as likely to be critical of the heroine's motivations, in however fugitive, slight and complex a fashion.

Complex but assured in its disposition of tones is the episode of the primroses, the symbolic moment in which Edward Weston indicates his concern for Miss Grey and even a particular interest in her.

Whether I walked with the young ladies or rode with their parents [to church of a Sunday], depended upon their own capricious will: if they chose to 'take' me, I went; if, for reasons best known to themselves, they chose to go alone, I took my seat in the carriage. I liked walking better, but a sense of reluctance to obtrude my presence on any one who did not desire it, always kept me passive on these and similar occasions; and I never inquired into the causes of their varying whims. Indeed, this was the best policy—for to submit and oblige was the governess's part, to consult their own pleasure was that of the pupils. But when I did walk, the first half of the journey was generally a great nuisance to me. As none of the before-mentioned ladies and gentlemen ever noticed me, it was disagreeable to walk beside them, as if listening to what they said, or wishing to be thought one of them, while they talked over me, or across; and if their eyes, in speaking, chanced to fall on me, it seemed as if they looked on vacancy—as if they either did not see me, or were very desirous to make it appear so. It was disagreeable, too, to walk behind, and thus appear to acknowledge my own inferiority; for, in truth, I considered myself pretty nearly as good as the best of them, and wished them to know that I did so, and not to imagine that I looked upon myself as a mere domestic, who knew her own place too well to walk beside such fine ladies and gentlemen as they were—though her young ladies might choose to have her with them, and even condescend to converse with her when no better company were at hand. Thus—I am almost ashamed to confess it—but indeed I gave myself no little trouble in my endeavours (if I did keep up with them) to appear perfectly unconscious or regardless of their presence, as if I were wholly absorbed in my own reflections, or the contemplation of surrounding objects; or, if I lingered behind, it was some bird or insect, some tree or flower, that attracted my attention, and having duly examined that, I would pursue my walk alone, at a leisurely pace, until my pupils had bidden adieu to their companions, and turned off into the quiet, private road.

One such occasion I particularly well remember: it was a lovely afternoon about the close of March; Mr. Green and his sisters had sent their carriage back empty, in order to enjoy the bright sunshine and balmy air in a sociable walk home along with their visitors, Captain Somebody and Lieutenant Somebody else (a couple of military fops), and the Misses Murray, who, of course, contrived to join them. Such a party was highly agreeable to Rosalie; but not finding it equally suitable to my taste, I presently fell back, and began to botanise and entomologise along the green banks and budding hedges, till the company was considerably in advance of me, and I could hear the sweet song of the happy lark; then my spirit of misanthropy began to melt away beneath the soft, pure air and genial sunshine: but sad thoughts of early childhood, and yearnings for departed joys, or for a brighter future lot, arose instead. As my eyes wandered over the steep banks covered with young grass and green-leaved plants, and surmounted by budding hedges, I longed intensely for some familiar flower that might recall the woody dales or green hillsides of home: the brown moorlands, of course, were out of the question. Such a discovery would make my eyes gush out with water, no doubt; but that was one of my greatest enjoyments now. At length I descried, high up between the twisted roots of an oak, three lovely primroses, peeping so sweetly from their hiding-place that the tears already started at the sight; but they grew so high above me that I tried in vain to gather one or two, to dream over and to carry with me: I could not reach them unless I climbed the bank, which I was deterred from doing by hearing a footstep at that moment behind me, and was, therefore, about to turn away, when I was startled by the words, 'Allow me to gather them for you, Miss Grey,' spoken in the grave low tones of a well-known voice. Immediately the flowers were gathered, and in my hand. It was Mr. Weston, of course—who else would trouble himself to do so much for me? (Ch. 13)

We are shown several of the concomitants when a human being is treated as a convenience, not as a full independent entity with a valued life. As her companions look through or talk over her, Agnes has no socially recognized means of reacting which repudiates her loss of status and yet which does not itself denigrate her. Even feeling resentment is demeaning, because it acknowledges a hurt and that means living at the standards and level of this third-rate company itself. Yet not to feel it, nor to attempt showing it in any way, would seem a loss of caste as a human identity; perhaps cowardly also, possibly too quietist in attitude.

It is a poisoning air Agnes Grey breathes at Horton, bringing decay into all aspects of her own nature, which cannot wholly be separated off (this is Anne Brontë's point) as something intrinsically distinct from her environment and its morality. It may well put us in mind of Fanny Price's dilemma at Mansfield Park, the predicament that is her entire role there—or of any good Austen character faced with delinquency in a constricted unalterable and inescapable social group. She is imprisoned and the impossibility of dealing wholly healthfully with the pressures upon her is illustrated for us in several features of this 'sequence'.

First of all there is the backbiting cattiness that mars her account of her young charges' visiting swains: 'Captain Somebody and Lieutenant Somebody else (a couple of military fops)'. This governess has a score of big just grievances against the Misses Murray, but we see resentment turning to general misanthropy in parlance so dismissive of those identities. And she who was once like a saint from Olympus in comparison with the mentality of her pupils begins, oppressed by their injustice, to sound like a cantankerous gossip of no elevated mind at all: 'for, in truth, I considered myself pretty nearly as good as the best of them, and wished them to know that I did so, and not to imagine that I looked upon myself as a mere domestic, who knew her own place too well to walk beside such fine ladies and gentlemen as they were—'.

That is not so very far off the internal chatter of Mrs. Petito, the lady's maid in Maria Edgeworth's The Absentee (published 1812, a novel which almost certainly Anne Brontë had read in her formative years):

'It will do very well, never mind,' repeated Petito, muttering to herself as she looked after the ladies whilst they ran downstairs, 'I can't abide to dress any young lady who says never mind, and it will do very well. That, and her never talking to one confidentially, or trusting one with the least bit of her secrets, is the thing I can't put up with from Miss Nigent; and Miss Broadhurst holding the pins to me, as much as to say, do your business, Petito, and don't talk. Now, that's so impertinent, as if one wasn't the same flesh and blood, and had not as good a right to talk of everything, and hear of everything, as themselves. And Mrs. Broadhurst, too, cabinet councilling with my lady, and pursing up her city mouth, when I come in, and turning off the discourse to snuff, forsooth, as if I was an ignoramus, to think they closeted themselves to talk of snuff. Now, I think a lady of quality's woman has as good a right to be trusted with her lady's secrets as with her jewels; and if my Lady Clonbrony was a real lady of quality, she'd know that, and consider the one as much my paraphernalia as the other. So I shall tell my lady tonight, as I always do when she vexes me, that I never lived in an Irish family before, and don't know the ways of it. Then she'll tell me she was born in Hoxfordshire; then I shall say, with my saucy look, "Oh, was you, my lady? I always forget that you was an Englishwoman." Then maybe she'll say "Forget! you forget yourself strangely, Petito." Then I shall say, with a great deal of dignity, "If your ladyship thinks so, my lady, I'd better go." And I'd desire no better than that she would take me at my word, for my Lady Dashfort's is a much better place, I'm told, and she's dying to have me, I know.'

Mrs. Petito is much more amusing and less justified in her situation than Agnes Grey in hers, yet a similar note is discernible in the musings of the latter heroine upon her wrongs, a kind of bleat-bleat-bleat of, itself, no very elevated mind.

In Reflections on the Psalms C. S. Lewis referred to what is centrally in question here:

It seemed to me that, seeing in them [the cursings in the Psalms] hatred undisguised, I saw also the natural result of injuring a human being. The word natural is here important. This result can be obliterated by grace, suppressed by prudence or social convention, and (which is dangerous) wholly disguised by selfdecseption. But just as the natural result of throwing a lighted match into a pile of shavings is to produce a fire—though damp or the intervention of some more sensible person may prevent it—so the natural result of cheating a man, or 'keeping him down' or neglecting him, is to arouse resentment; that is, to impose upon him the temptation of becoming what the Psalmists were when they wrote the vindictive passages. He may succeed in resisting the temptation; or he may not. If he fails, if he dies spiritually because of his hatred for me, how do I, who provoked that hatred, stand? For in addition to the original injury I have done him a far worse one. I have introduced into his inner life, at best a new temptation, at worst a new besetting sin. If that sin utterly corrupts him, I have in a sense debauched or seduced him. I was the tempter.'¹

Agnes Grey is not utterly corrupted by her experiences first at Wellwood and then Horton; but we are shown they do set fair to wreck her life. In a girl who started out guileless, ingenuous and open-minded, they have induced a sense of human incompetence and insufficiency that all but precludes marriage for her.

The author may here be writing very much from the heart. Of the three surviving Brontë sisters the various contemporary testimony has concurred with the view that Anne was the pretty one; she was personable and appealing as Charlotte, all self-consciously, was not. But if you are convinced you are unattractive—and in ways not only bodily—if you deem yourself unnoticeable and unmarriageable, unmarried is how you will tend to stay. It is really the function not of a look in a mirror which reveals actual deformity and repulsiveness: rather, a social and psychological disablement. And it is self-fulfilling. All compliment, all awakening interest in another party will appear mere vapour to you, will receive no appropriate response; indeed it will be repressed, stillborn, even in its very conception (within other people's awareness of you) by your habitual deportment, and paralysing self-estimate.

We the readers can see that Edward Weston is doing something not certainly but potentially 'speaking', in plucking those flowers for Miss Grey, but the latent significance of that gesture (not yet articulate for either of them, no doubt) the object of his attention misses: and the full text of her self-denigration we get in Chapter 17, concluding with this:

They that have beauty, let them be thankful for it, and make a good use of it, like any other talent; they that have it not, let them console themselves, and do the best they can without it: certainly, though liable to be over-estimated, it is a gift of God, and not to be despised. Many will feel this who have felt that they could love, and whose hearts tell them that they are worthy to be loved again; while yet they are debarred by the lack of this or some such seeming trifle, from giving and receiving that happiness they seem almost made to feel and to impart.

The primroses episode is as subtly handled as it needs to be. We should not respect Agnes if she were the sort of woman who saw flirtation in every male smile and a marriage proposal round every corner: that itself would betoken psychological disablement of a less attractive kind. And indeed the little scene is variously interpretable. Weston may simply help her pick her flowers out of politeness, or speak with her motivated by charity towards someone he recognizes as humanly very cut off and lonely; any sort of amorous implication is not—and should not be—explicit between them. For such a thing to be raised to the level of consciousness at all in either breast would signalize a crudity of response each to the other which would make them lesser people than they are.

What Anne Brontë is delineating with beautiful delicacy is one of those moments when someone may or may not be feeling his/her way toward you (in the sense of a more special relationship than good neighbourliness) and with a feeling the character of which they themselves have by no means analytically grasped; which the wellintegrated person, when mutually disposed, will accept—i.e. leave—at that, to ride upon the air with its own vibration.

Locked by the behaviour of her successive households of employment, however, into a steep fall of self-confidence, Agnes Grey responds to Edward Weston's every word and gesture in a manner that would choke off interest in all but the most tenacious of suitors. On her side she keeps hoping for his attachment but has lost, because she has been discouraged from ever gaining, the social aplomb (i.e. through self-confidence) to ripen another's attention into regard and regard into courtship—which entails permitting, not hastening nor retarding, a process of self-confidence in the other party. All this is implicit in the inadequacy of her account of the business: 'It was Mr. Weston, of course—who else would trouble himself to do so much for me?'

Most of the time she is gauche in his company, we see, and speaks so much at cross-purposes as even to fail of giving her admirer knowledge of her new address in the coastal town where she and her mother are to set up their school when she leaves Horton.

All this is the more satisfactorily handled, in an artistic point of view, for not being explicit between author and reader—throughout. It is quietly intimated to us, but totally adumbrated, how this young couple come near to missing their best fulfilment in life on account of the sheer quantity of discouragement which, unawares, the heroine places in the hero's track: a misdirection itself born of her discouragement. And that that is to be laid at the door of the people with whom she has worked is illustrated most flagrantly when the Murray girls keep their instructress indoors and, in their meetings with Weston, allege she stays there by choice:

'And he asked after you again,' said Matilda, in spite of her sister's silent but imperative intimation that she should hold her tongue. 'He wondered why you were never with us, and thought you must have delicate health, as you came out so seldom.'

'He didn't, Matilda—what nonsense you're talking!'

'Oh, Rosalie, what a lie! He did, you know; and you said—Don't, Rosalie—hang it!—I won't be pinched so! And, Miss Grey, Rosalie told him you were quite well, but you were always so buried in your books that you had no pleasure in anything else!' (Ch. 17)

Rosalie Murray, not being emotionally inhibited, obviously is aware of the curate's potential devotion to her teacher and, wanting to engross all worthy male compliments in the district to herself, feigns lack of interest on the part of the one toward the other. It is very cruel and wrong, and Agnes Grey's further substantiality as a portrait of life lies in anatomizing for us where such callousness derives.

In successive phases the two engagements its heroine takes on illustrate the origin and process of bad upbringing. The youngsters Agnes goes to are monsters of self-conceit and uncharitableness because they have been, and continue to be, parentally neglected. Basically their fathers and mothers do not care about them (as individuals); which is why they do not discipline them.

Chapter 3 demolishes all the modem cant about children being sacrosanct from bodily inflictions. Was there ever a gentler spirit than Anne Brontë's or her heroine's? Yet as Agnes is moved to protest:

Master Tom, not content with refusing to be ruled, must needs set up as a ruler, and manifested a determination to keep, not only his sisters, but his governess in order, by violent manual and pedal applications; and, as he was a tall, strong boy of his years, this occasioned no trifling inconvenience. A few sound boxes in the ear, on such occasions, might have settled the matter easily enough: but as, in that case, he might make up some story to his mother, which she would be sure to believe, as she had such unshaken faith in his veracity—though I had already discovered it to be by no means unimpeachable—I determined to refrain from striking him, even in self-defence; and, in his most violent moods, my only resource was to throw him on his back, and hold his hands and feet till the frenzy was somewhat abated. To the difficulty of preventing him from doing what he ought not, was added that of forcing him to do what he ought. Often he would positively refuse to learn, or to repeat his lessons, or even to look at his book. Here, again, a good birch rod might have been serviceable; but, as my powers were so limited, I must make the best use of what I had.

For when all else fails the only thing which will speak to a morally deaf child is physical pain. Reasoning, civilized offered responses are unavailing because an alien language; and this in turn owing to the child's essential previous neglect.

Agnes Grey could not be more urgently relevant to our own society now: an age (as it seems to me) where perhaps most parents in all classes are in essentials just like the besotted Bloomfield and Murray adults. In too many cases nowadays folk appear to get married and have children, not for the love of those undertakings in themselves but as some sort of venture into additional human status, a further inward-looking self-endorsement. Mrs. Bloomfield is not interested in her offspring except as very tangential extensions of her own selfesteem and social aura: the hard work of a mother's love interests her not at all. That would involve effort, toil, care of a merely boring kind, because she is not in the first place bothered about having a relationship with her children. She wants them, but as items which can go in and out of some sort of cupboard in her life marked 'Progeny', and shut up there with a surrogate, the governess, who is officially employed to turn them into rational well-conducted creatures but who has hardly any real chance of doing so.

For the children, like all children, know when essentially they are minor tangentialities in their parents' values—always a ripe source of delinquency; and like all the cruelly indifferent, father and mother substitute a phoney humanitarianism in the place of true upbringing, as a sop to Cerberus and makeshift for the lapse on their part of the one thing needful, their attention.

Given that a majority of marriages and child-rearings are like this in the U.K. today (to judge by the theft endemic among 'middle' and 'upper'-class children, the pink and green hairstyles of the punk rockers—for what are these things but desperate cries for attention?) Agnes Grey can hardly be set aside as no tract for the times—our times.

The parents of 1983 are like the silly couples at Wellwood and Horton: they are wishful of anything for their children except to give them, consistently, out of a true devotion, their time, their interest, their selves: to bother with them. And then we wring our hands in adult colloquy about the rising crime wave of an affluent society and wonder how on earth atrocity can increase where social conditions are improved, historically, almost out of recognition. But children do not live by bread alone; they cope with life according as they are loved; which means being bothered with, related to, continually, by their progenitors and homemakers.

In the two youths who some months ago actually broke into the house of an old woman of 96 and raped her, we see the breakdown of even the most (one would have thought) fundamental taboos of creaturely life; and.without question they must have been subhuman to be able to do that. Yet what was even their act but a revenge upon the bad parenthood generally prevalent in our society? And a function of the rottenness of that state, that primary tie, in our day is the general refusal, codified by the intelligentsia into a dogma, to have real discipline around, including corporal punishment, whether at home or at school. For as the devil Screwtape points out to his minion Wormwood:

The use of Fashions in thought is to distract the attention of men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running about with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under. Thus we make it fashionable to expose the dangers of enthusiasm at the very moment when they are all really becoming worldly and lukewarm; a century later, when we are really making them all Byronic and drunk with emotion, the fashionable outcry is directed against the dangers of the mere 'understanding'. Cruel ages are put on their guard against Sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against Respectability, lecherous ones against Puritanism; and whenever all men are really hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.²

Exactly. In our epoch, when children's great predicament is that they are undisciplined (because ignored and unloved), the spectre which raises so very many teachers' and parents' hands in horror is the mere idea of corporal—indeed of any real—punishment.

Thus it is that both sets of parents can be so little aware of their offspring's true characters, can demand of Miss Grey that she turn them out as superior in behaviour to the hoydenism which at best, for instance, the girls display; and yet be affornted at any suggestion of bit or curb in a coherent process of charactertraining (viz. Mrs. Murray's reproaches in Ch. 18).

Hence it is that Tom Bloomfield can be so hideously cruel to animals, and his siblings with him (Chs. 2 and 5), in scenes which have provoked disbelief. Much that we pride our humanity upon are virtues and reciprocities acquired, by no means guaranteed as birthright for the species; and homo sapiens tends to love and care for living things only as he knows love and care experientially himself. When children are brought into the world by begetters who are not interested in them—when they are denied the primary experience of love so completely as that—how will they have 'natural' feelings towards plants, the animal kingdom or their own kind?

Anne Brontë, in Chapters 21 and 22, sends her heroine to stay with the young married Rosalie Murray within a year of her becoming a lady of the manor at Ashby Park, not simply to fill out her story, nor to exhibit supernatural piety in forgiveness and charitable feeling on the observant governess's part towards a former tormentor; but to trace into a new generation yet again the consequences of this sort of denial which was prevalent amongst the higher classes in her day and which—perhaps with so much relative prosperity materially—has now spread through our society as a whole.

What Agnes discovers in that brief cheerless visit is not merely, as expected, that Rosalie does not care for her husband, is already at enmity with his family and something of a prisoner in the round of her rural wedded condition—because there is so little real affection and respect on both sides of a marriage made from paltry motives. The new mother cannot even love her child, and has just the same disparaging dismissive feelings about the baby to whom she herself has given birth that were all she really inspired in her own parent:

'But I can't devote myself entirely to a child,' said she: 'it may die—which is not at all improbable.'

'But, with care, many a delicate infant has become a strong man or woman.'

'But it may grow so intolerably like its father that I shall hate it.'

'That is not likely; it is a little girl, and strongly resembles its mother.'

'No matter; I should like it better if it were a boy—only that its father will leave it no inheritance that he can possibly squander away. What pleasure can I have in seeing a girl grow up to eclipse me, and enjoy those pleasures that I am for ever debarred from? But supposing I could be so generous as to take delight in this, still it is only a child; and I can't centre all my hopes in a child: that is only one degree better than devoting oneself to a dog. And as for all the wisdom and 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: but people must enjoy themselves when they are young; and if others won't let them—why, they must hate them for it!'

Egotism in its turn will no doubt be the psychological portion of a child so raised; and that self-conceit disables others who are not even guilty of being blood-kindred is what the previous chapters of the novel have shown, with the assault on the governess's capacity for happiness made by her ordeal in both her situations of employment. Her experience of the outer world, after a sheltered childhood, proves to be of an arena where people look over or through her and withhold all sense of her having a human value; so she all but becomes unmarriageable. Philip Larkin has put it memorably:

Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf.³

and Anne Brontë is here tracing the process in its origins.

Agnes Grey, then, is about the way all of us tend to mutilate one another's lives—radically—in affording our fellow creatures less than full respect as equal beings having an independent importance like to our own: which is as much as to say, the manner to some degree most of us treat each other most of the time.

The novel is also about coping, however; about making something workable out of the human mess. Its heroine achieves this in virtue of her moral education in a loving environment, her training and religious piety from a background of fine sensibility—and the randomness of life itself.

She starts with supplemental advantages that may by no means be underived. Her imagination and the sly humour which animates a considerable portion of her narrative themselves constitute a resilience under the pressures all around. Take the following, for example, concerning the senior Mrs. Bloomfield:

Hitherto, though I saw the old lady had her defects (of which one was a proneness to proclaim her perfections), I had always been wishful to excuse them, and to give her credit for all the virtues she professed, and even imagine others yet untold. (Ch. 4)

It is the subtlety of the final nuance there which invigorates—as it is indeed the function of a vigour in the writer. That sentence is a straightforward, obvious enough piece of satire until its last clause briefly makes us skid. There the hyperbole of feeling is shown in the context to have several constituents. The young woman is desperately lonely and clutching at straws:

Kindness, which had been the food of my life through so many years, had lately been so entirely denied me, that I welcomed with grateful joy the slightest semblance of it.

She is also setting up as a judicious judge, self-consciously slightly witty, though we cannot forget she is only 19. The tone is of a self-possession and social ease which are not really secure, and yet which is the honest property of a genuinely discriminative mind.

It is the ability to transmit trace-elements of this sort of light weight yet significance which made me before think of Jane Austen and Professor George Whalley's words on that novelist's 'delight in effortless virtuosity, in catching by an impossible fraction of a hair's-breadth the savour of a nuance of implication'.⁴

This is not the leading hallmark of Agnes Grey's mind and rhetoric; Anne Brontë's themes are different. Yet the capacity to mock the old lady, mock herself and make several serious points with the necessary fugitiveness that characteristically we find here, itself represents a human value which is also a defence—however much that is to be seen as more securely acquired in retrospect than at the time.

Or we can turn to Chapter 19. Here a less qualified kind of irony operates which signifies a very amiable robustness in the moral nature of the bereaved family that the surviving Grey womenfolk have now become:

'Your grandpapa has been so kind as to write to me. He says he has no doubt I have long repented of my "unfortunate marriage," and if I will only acknowledge this, and confess I was wrong in neglecting his advice, and that I have justly suffered for it, he will make a lady of me once again—if that be possible after my long degradation—and remember my girls in his will.'

But Mrs. Grey intends to answer with defiance and specifies the various heads of her reasoning why, concluding

'Will this do, children?—or shall I say we are all very sorry for what has happened during the last thirty years, and my daughters wish they had never been born; but since they have had that misfortune, they will be thankful for any trifle their grandpapa will be kind enough to bestow?'

Of course, we both applauded our mother's resolution; Mary cleared away the breakfast things; I brought the desk; the letter was quickly written and despatched; and, from that day, we heard no more of our grandfather, till we saw his death announced in the newspaper a considerable time after—all his worldly possessions, of course, being left to our wealthy, unknown cousins.

A word en passant here. Does not Agnes Grey very considerably more than any other Brontë novel stick to the sort of realism which Charlotte Brontë sought to infuse into the nineteenth century's fiction at the commencement of her public foray?⁵

Finally, in proof of our heroine's vitality as a centre of discriminations we have her ear for dialogue. Anyone who can reproduce as faithfully as she does very different styles of speech, sometimes in proximity together, and even the variations of an individual's modes of discourse, has by definition an extrovert awareness of others and life's variety which itself confers hope upon her fate as well as facilitating an active conscience.

'I have another place to go to,' said he, 'and I see' (glancing at the book on the table) 'some one else has been reading to you.'

'Yes, sir; Miss Grey has been as kind as to read me a chapter; an' now she's helping me with a shirt for our Bill but I'm feared she'll be cold there. Won't you come to th'fire, miss?' …

'Miss Grey,' said he half-jestingly, as if he felt it necessary to change the present subject, whether he had anything particular to say or not, 'I wish you would make my peace with the squire, when you see him. He was by when I rescued Nancy's cat, and did not quite approve of the deed. I told him I thought he might better spare all his rabbits than she her cat, for which audacious assertion he treated me to some rather ungentlemanly language; and I fear I retorted a trifle too warmly.'

'Oh, lawful sir! I hope you didn't fall out wi' th' maister for sake o' my cat! he cannot bide answering again—can th' maister.'

'Oh, it's no matter, Nancy: I don't care about it, really; I said nothing very uncivil; and I suppose Mr. Murray is accustomed to use rather strong language when he's heated.' (Ch. 12)

The slight orotund pomposity of language, the relatively elaborate grammatical organization in the longest sentence there quoted contrasts with the other remarks Mr. Weston makes to his two parishioners. He is embarrassed both at the context and content of what he finds to say at that juncture and his diction subtly alters, accordingly.

The use and aid of such equipment for an ethical being has already been shown in the way Agnes reports her tearful self-pity and maudlin self-contempt during the primroses episode: 'Such a discovery would make my eyes gush out with water, no doubt; but that was one of my greatest enjoyments now.' The self-indulgence is there contained and disciplined by a conscience, we realize, habituated to exercise and examination.

Starch of a more nutritive kind is supplied by her religion. Ultimately she has not been brought up to expect, i.e. demand, of this world a nice time. (Osip Mandelstam's words to his wife, before dying for his brave outspokenness, put the matter at its most bleakly direct: 'Why do you think you ought to be happy?') Indeed the more I study Anne Brontë's work the more it seems to me she is first and foremost a Christian writer; and this creates problems in connection with a late-twentieth-century readership at least analogous to the question of the validity, for our society now, of Europe's medieval poetry, shot through as most of that is with a religious interpretation of existence. The issue is so large I choose to try and take the bull by the horns in a separate section later. Suffice it to say here it is significant that Anne Brontë, as was remarked before, accomplishes the most 'realistic' story of any fiction the Haworth sisters chose to publish. Agnes Grey has no unanswered questions like the method of Heathcliff's making his fortune before he returns to Wuthering Heights, or Jane Eyre with its magnificent psychology yet preposterous plot.

It rides beautifully between the Scylla and Charybdis of any social realist in the form. On the one side, it does not yield to softness: in E. M. Forster's words, 'the temptation's overwhelming to grant to one's creations a happiness actual life does not supply.'⁶ On the other hand, it does not flog its characters with a grim Hardyesque determinism of misery, something no less fantastic, at least in its artistic effect. The Brontës' actual life-history reads fully as unfortunate as Jude the Obscure's, but were it hawked in a fiction we should probably withhold credence. The trouble with Hardy for me is that, like real life sometimes (as Forster has elsewhere also remarked), he 'gets things wrong',⁷ and the awful trajectories of his heroes' courses all but overwhelm the other, wonderful features of his prose writing because they create the impression of an universe deliberately malign without 'arguing the case', imaginatively speaking, for such a view; sufficiently at least to carry conviction during the space of the reading. 'Yet why are these people so remarkably stupid and dogged by such unusual quantities of stupendous ill-luck?' is my repeated moan as I trace the agonies of Jude and his fellow-sufferers. 'If "It", as Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson called the First Cause, were so implacably cruel, surely the first amoeba would never have managed to crawl out of the slime.'

I think the complaint has little to do with the portion of tragedies in one's own life. Different authors can penetrate us with the sense, at least for the nonce, that 'not to be born is best' or, in C. S. Lewis's words immediately after the death of his wife, trying out the voice of advocatus diaboli 'Fate (or whatever it is) delights to produce a great capacity and then frustrate it. Beethoven went deaf. By our standards a mean joke; the monkey trick of a spiteful imbecile.'⁸ But they do so, these other writers, by means more solidly based and inwardly structured.

Agnes Grey suffers enough and various afflictions to become representative of ordinary humanity—equally in the lower-to-middle middle classes of her day, and at large. Her home life is happy at first, but her father loses his money and by the standards of their caste their means become almost desperately straitened; and the psychological as well as material costs of this debacle are registered. She sets out to earn her own living and add something to the common funds besides, by teaching; and finds the task not only unpleasant but degrading—not once but twice over. Her sister marries, modestly. Her mother becomes a widow, and when they set up a school together they have to work hard to make ends meet with no provision in view should either of them be stricken ill, except that of falling hard upon her brother-in-law and his thin means. Agnes loves, but her affection seems unrequited and she has to reconcile herself to the nearly certain prospect of a future as a hapless old maid.

This constitutes a sufficient series of possibilities followed up by frustrations. More would look like authorial obtuseness. We should say in that case, 'Well if life is really tougher still than this—more painful, of its own intrinsic logic, inevitably—it is hardly worth caring about in the first place. With the words of Ernest Hemingway's heroine at the end of A Farewell to Arms, "It's just a dirty trick" (Ch. 41), our most appropriate response would be to turn our faces thankfully to the wall whenever we could and like her expire with an expression of contempt upon them.' On the other hand, if Agnes Grey's career were pleasanter we should be tempted to retort, 'Very nice, but where have all the bereavements and economic hardships gone, the frustrations intellectual and emotional? There seem to be plenty more of such things in the world outside than between the covers of this book. It's just a novelette of female wish-fulfilment.'

In short, it appears to me Anne Brontë pitches the matter just right. The duplication of unsatisfactory households in which her heroine works makes a social criticism even as it builds the picture of a whole social world. The upper classes in her time have too much power, too much freedom to be bad. That they use these liberties ill is thoroughly exemplified, not only by the characters of the Bloomfields and the Murrays and their on the whole repulsive children, but by the local squirearchies in each case surrounding them and their various relations and friends.

This is the book's Tyranny-theme in its political aspect: that in such a society as early Victorian Britain, certain individuals can disregard too many aspects of the Golden Rule just because they have lots of money. It is all-significant that more than one type of gentry abuses equally their freedoms of cash and time: Mr. Bloomfield the self-made tradesman, Mr. Murray of the 'genuine thoroughbred gentry' (Ch. 6) and the lower aristocracy with whom he associates. The implication of this is evident for us, though never worked out or otherwise than implicit in the text: the need so to restructure society's economics that one group does not exist in a state of nearly complete possession and others in almost total dependence. And indeed upon the same theme the British nation has exercised itself more impressively than most other communities, historically considered, during the past century and a half.

Terry Eagleton, writing from a Marxist point of view, offers generous appreciation of certain features of Anne Brontë in general and the present work in particular. E.g.,

Whereas Lucy Snowe's chiding of Polly Home and Ginevra Fanshawe betrays less reputable motives than mere moral disinterestedness, Agnes Grey admonishes her obnoxious charges with a remarkable freedom from personal malice—the more remarkable because we have in this work a more direct and detailed account of the social violence to which the governess is subjected than anything we find elsewhere in the Brontës.⁹

Noting that 'Her fraught relation to her pupils … provides a painfully lucid image of "genteel" poverty's unwilling alliance with morally irresponsible wealth',¹⁰ he accurately indicates why 'Agnes's responses are cooler, more equable than those we find in a Charlotte protagonist's truck with the gentry'; it is because here the heroine's 'own amour-propre is not fundamentally at stake'.

He declares also that she and the book avoid smugness. He confesses its lucidity:

Its final line—'And now I think I have said sufficient'neatly captures the laconic modesty of the whole, the sense of a work attractively reserved in feeling without any loss of candid revelation."¹¹

Yet ultimately, he argues, 'the orthodox critical judgement that Anne Brontë's work is slighter than her sisters' is just',¹² because there is only 'one brief moment in Agnes Grey when Agnes, dispirited by her fruitless efforts to instil moral principle into the Murrays' spoilt brats, wonders whether her own standards of rectitude might not be insidiously eroded by daily contact with such dissoluteness."'¹³ Always in her work there is a 'partial unhinging of the "moral" from a nurturing social context.'¹⁴

But such a complaint is more about the novel's subject-matter than its treatment thereof. For the predicament, how to be a relatively responsible moral agent and cope with inhabiting a delinquent social world, when life itself also offers plenty of frustrations, is one in which every decent reader of the book must be interested. Anne Brontë does not (pace Dr. Eagleton) oppose the 'social' and the 'moral': that primroses episode alone, to which I keep referring simply as a type of the whole, showed us the governess's feelings on being not recognized by society as a full human entity not only being analysed by her; they were presented (by the author which notionally she has become) as more complex, fraught and vulnerable—the tone does this, the juxtaposition of events in the passage quoted—than she herself recognized at the time. She is more pained and compromised than she admits. That is what we are made and given to see, exemplified as it is by the way a certain literariness will rub shoulders uneasily with more direct colloquial narrative: 'I presently fell back, and began to botanise and entomologise … '. We realize that she does not entirely know any longer how to manage her self-awareness while yet being conscious that it is perilously near to sentimental self-pity.

Her religious convictions and training preserve her however, we can see, from progressive mere self-endorsement and ultimately cranky isolation. They save her from a collapse of the self, in giving an exterior standard—the Gospels' hopes and commands—by which to keep measuring her conduct and attitudes. Faced with the lapse, pretty well, of her hope of marriage and doomed, as it appears, to a future of worthiness but boredom, she articulates this:

Should I shrink from the work that God had set before me, because it was not fitted to my taste? Did not He know best what I should do, and where I ought to labour? and should I long to quit His service before I had finished my task, and expect to enter His rest without having laboured to earn it? (Ch. 21)

Nor is it that she strikes us, on such occasions, as some haloed goody-goody, in her commitment to the 'strait gate and narrow way': she can show the refreshing fierceness of the truly, likeably virtuous from time to time, when appropriately provoked. Writing of Mr. Robson's encouragement of his nephew Tom Bloomfield's 'propensity to persecute the lower creation, both by precept and example', we have the following:

As he frequently came to course or shoot over his brother-in-law's grounds, he would bring his favourite dogs with him; and he treated them so brutally that, poor as I was, I would have given a sovereign any day to see one of them bite him, provided the animal could have done it with impunity. (Ch. 5)

Significantly it is when she has resigned herself, actively, to her lot—a worthy one as an instructress in the seminary of her own making but a fate without joy—that the break comes. Agnes Grey illustrates thus the Christian gloss upon Elizabeth Bowen's great dictum, 'We are constructed for full living. Occasion rarely offers'; and E. M. Forster's apt comment in A Passage to India, 'Adventures do occur, but not punctually.'

'Unless the grain dies …' Only when the heart has resigned its earthly hopes (especially its very dearest ones) in favour of obedience to its supreme marriage-bond, its role as Bride of the Lamb, can God afford to make this-worldly happiness available to those He loves as children who can be saved. Until then, awarding us the felicities we ache, the reliefs we gasp for, as the central fulfilments in our lives, He is just encouraging us to dance off down a mirage-track to ultimate death beside the transitory water-holes of our own imaging.

After plenty of happy upbringing, followed by oppression and suppression, Agnes has to lose her last great hope this side of the grave—beyond that of doing her duty as a Christian—and she has to live on quite a while with that lost hope rendered seemingly permanent as lost; before its realization arrives after all.

When it does so, Prince Charming hardly sweeps her off in a glass coach at one bound, nor with brightly caparisoned chargers. Edward Weston's situation and character are perfect for the book's purposes. He is sturdy and real enough to be reassuring: no mere cardboard cut-out of a perfect cleric with extremely modest means. Yet he is intrinsically un-exciting enough to figure in the reader's lay-mind as not—like marriage to Mr. Darcy for Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice—a brilliant upshot for the heroine's career, both socially and emotionally. After their re-encounter by happy chance (here Life's own helpful randomness comes in) on the sands of Agnes's new home town, it takes some time before he proposes marriage, some weeks indeed—and then the romance is very quiet. Winifred Gérin has censured the close of the novel as exposing interests uncombined, not unified, on the author's part:

Yet it was inevitable that the dual purpose of the book should emerge; that those portions which were derived from fact should be more vividly realised and that the purely fictitious incidents should be slurred over, as inappropriate, as it were, to the fuller treatment. Thus the happy ending to which, as fiction, Anne had not the heart to deny her heroine, is written in so low and subdued a key that it saddens rather than elates the reader. Judged from the standpoint of art this is a mistake; the story of Agnes Grey begun in such buoyant style, with so much wit and sparkle, should not modulate into a minor key and close in solemnity since, in spite of some tribulations, the heroine's happiness is assured.¹⁵

But that misses the various points of which the accomplishment is here achieved. (1) The book is about the business of reconciling oneself to possible modes of happiness, not extremely unlikely ones—as well as to actual species of suffering. Were the hero handsome, witty, rich and charming, we should ignore the whole as a day-dream: for how often could portionless young governesses, gauche of manner and no brilliant beauties withal, get proposals from such as they—then or now? (2) It helps solve the aesthetic problem for most novels with a happy ending—the suggestion, artistically constituted by the very procédé of the plot, that life has now stopped, albeit on a plateau of fulfilments. We cannot imagine Elizabeth and Darcy living through their first married quarrel or the death of a child; rightly—we do not want to and there would be no value in the exercise. It would be a 'How many children had Lady Macbeth?' sort of question. But here it is of the essence of the piece, our well knowing that trials face the couple of the concluding scene—several of these in his pastoral life and her parish-work at Horton we have beheld already. Life carries on at the close of Agnes Grey and it is the real life where 'il faut cultiver son jardin'. If the young pair do not attempt to penetrate the aristocracy nor hold themselves entirely aloof from it but keep fairly distant from certain classes' routines and blandishments with no sense of loss, it is in order to stay 'unspotted from the World' in the sense that we associate that term with 'the Flesh and the Devil'. This is no question of retreat or escapism, quite the reverse. We see two committed social workers taking up their task in the broad blaze of historical day and the middle of public highways at the end of Anne Brontë's first novel. Miss Grey's fate, far from being a sort of transcendent one, untied to the earth, like the brides' at the ends of most comedy, means happiness; but happiness in the world outside the covers of a human celebration, and amidst that world's problems.

What could be set down for a flaw is the book's failure to convey the lovers' feelings for each other, or at least its heroine's for its hero, from the inside in their full 'romantic' aspect. This is a manque writ larger in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. In both works we know that the characters have powerful amorous inclinations towards each other: but as a Briton and an Australian are well aware that their respective countries exist on opposite shores of the globe without appreciating those terrains in their reality until they have paid a visit the one to the other. When not only Helen Graham's response to Arthur Huntingdon, in the early time of their acquaintance, is mediated to us sans its full alleged erotic colouring and necessary emotional intensity, but also Huntingdon's later for Annabella Lowborough and, here, Agnes Grey's for Edward Weston, we are likely to suspect that some sort of psychological inhibition was operative in this author—perhaps an excess of delicacy. But we must also appreciate that conveying passion is no facile undertaking, artistically considered. Henry James was surely a born novelist if ever there has been one, and his pages throb with the sexual interest woken by men and women in each other: The Awkward Age seems to me white hot, like poor Nanda Brookenham's face there, with the passion of her feeling for Vanderbank. But it is not till as late in his career as The Golden Bowl (1905) that James can make his characters convincingly embrace, and had he died at the same early age as Anne Brontë (he would have been 29 years and 4 months old in August 1872) what would he have left to show of his excellent craftsmanship, his true novelistic gift and inspiration? Well, one novel Watch and Ward (1869); nineteen tales, up to 'Guest's Confession'; and some substantial travel and critical writings—but no such masterwork as A Portrait of a Lady.

While this is a flaw in The Tenant and a serious one, we may even vindicate it in Agnes Grey, the unsubstantiated inner life of the lovers' feelings for each other; since throughout the whole, Weston is seen, necessarily for the novel's effect, ab exteriori (being registered through the anxious uncertain eyes of the governess), and the tale concludes with the relief of her emotions in his proposal, a rescue and fulfilment about which it would be tasteless in her to brag.

That their religious commitment has its own dangers Anne Brontë is also concerned to illustrate. In the case of old Nancy Brown (Ch. 11, 'The Cottagers') she shows the religious melancholy infused into nineteenth-century life in consequence of the Evangelical Movement and its reanimation of a living Church in her society. This elderly widow is harrowed by the very creed which ought to comfort her:

' … th' prayer-book only served to show me how wicked I was, that I could read such good words an' never be no better for it, and oftens feel it a sore labour an' a heavy task beside, instead of a blessing and a privilege as all good Christians does. It seemed like as all were barren an' dark to me. And then, them dreadful words, "Many shall seek to enter in, and shall not be able." They like as they fair dried up my sperrit.'

With this instance Anne Brontë is not only working out a major quarrel with herself—there is little evidence to contradict the view of both her sister Charlotte and her biographer that it was in battling against religious melancholy that most of her own brief life was spent—she is 'being fair' as a creative spirit and implying, with exemplary equity, how the very philosophy she commends to society carries, like any doctrine which is a reading of History and an ethos, its own pitfalls too:

' … I tried to do my duty as aforetime: but I like got no peace. An' I even took the sacrament; but I felt as though I were eating and drinking to my own damnation all th' time. So I went home, sorely troubled.'

As well as the moral strengthening and psychic power, for the individual and the community, deriving from Christian conviction, there will be casualties who need aid.

Aid may come in the form of direct sensible and perceptive pastoral counsel. Mr Weston the new curate points out that we love by practice; in acting out a pretence of the Saviour's commands, our habits become reality, the Beast behind the beautiful mask becomes a Beauty.

'But if you cannot feel positive affection for those who do not care for you, you can at least try to do to them as you would they should do unto you: you can endeavour to pity their failings and excuse their offences, and to do all the good you can to those about you. And if you accustom yourself to this, Nancy, the very effort itself will make you love them in some degree—to say nothing of the goodwill your kindness would beget in them, though they might have little else that is good about them… . '(Ch. 11)

Divine counsel will also be available, advice not made with hands or uttered by human voices—in the grandeur, the elevating loveliness of Nature. A kind of basso ostinato runs through this book as through all of Anne Brontë's work, a first-hand experience of Nature as restorative, invigorating, a spiritual sanctuary and very present help in trouble. Again and again the heroine is struck by some prospect or deliberately goes to feed upon some part of the physical environment which encompasses mere men, finding there new strength and fresh comfort.

And then, the unspeakable purity and freshness of the air! there was just enough heat to enhance the value of the breeze, and just enough wind to keep the whole sea in motion, to make the waves come bounding to the shore, foaming and sparkling, as if wild with glee. Nothing else was stirring—no living creature was visible besides myself. My footsteps were the first to press the firm, unbroken sands;— nothing before had trampled them since last night's flowing tide had obliterated the deepest marks of yesterday, and left it fair and even, except where the subsiding water had left behind it the traces of dimpled pools, and little running streams. (Ch. 24)

Hence the appositeness of her meeting Weston again, after thinking perpetually to have lost him, upon these sands of 'A-'. She has come to drink once more at the only fount where such perceptions and thirsts as (say) Wordsworth's could be slaked; and in doing so for its own sake has had everything else she cares for added unto her.

Which makes another point. Good Chance also exists. That too is part of God's Creation, the reality with which we humans have to come to terms. Weston may well be suspected of having accepted a living near 'A-' in the hope of one day running into his heart's best find. He has helped, if we will, give Luck a nudge, even a hearty one. But now he and his bride-to-be have been assisted by the randomness of things as well as hindered, in the past, by their cruelty: here it has expressed itself in his being offered such a living as 'F-', 'a village about two miles distant', in the first place; and in the second, their re-encountering as they do.

Nevertheless there is an aspect in which the story is consummated with a sense of anti-climax. Miss Gérin has the right idea by the wrong end. Similarly to Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility, though with rather more individualized character, Agnes Grey's lover constitutes no thrilling human presence; and we wish wistfully that he did.

But then by what right should he? Like most of us, the governess herself, considered whether physically or morally, socially or intellectually, is not the catch of catches. Yet she has a passionate yearning heart and the instinctual wisdom to fix upon what it can elevate to absolute value by its very devotion. Thus much we deduce, I think, across the trajectory of her rhetoric. For as Metropolitan Anthony Bloom once pointed out,¹⁶ it is the character of Love to make significant what is even of itself trivial. And Weston is far more than that.

It is questionable all the same whether Agnes could so elevate a man like Mr. Hatfield, Horton's worldly vicar, or some member of Rosalie Murray's set of squirearchical-aristocratic admirers, even if she were noticed by them. They lack a dimension of conscience and feeling necessary to give those responses which can make Love a prosperous horticulturist. Her marriage with the former curate however can become something great (we again intuit), though he is not the most exciting individual since Sir Philip Sidney. She has herself planted half the garden her devotion will raise in the soil of this man's worthiness, somewhat stolid as it is. But that won't make its fruits and blooms any less real or precious than they already promise to be.

All this shows as mattering the more in the context of a novel which has illustrated only too vividly through most of its course what people are like when morally untutored by either precept of suffering.

The subject-matter and style of this book are of the first importance—in their very quietness. In a sense Anne Brontë's relegation is the final proof of her success. Her compact but richly realized fable about what life is like and how to live works so totally, it is eclipsed by fierier rockets of illumination that throw a more fitful glare upon the scene. Agnes Grey is full of the way in which people have to make ends meet— financially, psychologically—in the real world; and Life's own creative play there as well.

Notes

¹ Op. cit., Fontana edition (London, 1967), p. 26.

²The Screwtape Letters (London, 1942), pp. 128-29.

³High Windows (London, 1974), p. 30.

⁴ In Jane Austen 's Achievement, ed. Juliet McMaster (London, 1976), pp. 121-22.

⁵ 'By the time she wrote [The Professor] her taste and judgment had revolted against the exaggerated idealisms of her early girlhood, and she went to the extreme of reality, closely depicting characters as they had shown themselves to her in actual life: if there they were strong even to coarseness—as was the case with some that she had met with in flesh-and-blood existence—she "wrote them down an ass;" if the scenery of such life as she saw was for the most part wild and grotesque, instead of pleasant or picturesque, she described it line for line. The grace of the one or two scenes and characters which are drawn rather from her own imagination than from absolute fact, stand out in exquisite relief from the deep shadows and wayward lines of others, which call to mind some of the portraits of Rembrandt.'—Mrs. Gaskell's Life (ed. Ward & Shorter), p. 313.

⁶ E. M. Forster, Maurice (London, 1971): quoted in P. N. Furbank's Introduction, letter to G. L. Dickinson of 13 December 1914.

⁷Abinger Harvest (pocket edn., London 1940), from 1932 review of Jane Austen's Letters, p. 158.

⁸A Grief Observed (London, 1961), section II, para. 1.

⁹ Terry Eagleton, Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës (London, 1975), p. 123.

¹⁰ Ibid., p. 124. The quote immediately following in my text is from this page also.

¹¹ Ibid., p. 126.

¹² Ibid., p. 134.

¹³ Ibid., p. 123.

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 132.

¹⁵ W. Gérin, Anne Brontë (London [1959]; rev. edn., 1976), p. 230.

¹⁶ At a religious meeting-and-discussion session in York University, circa 1978.