[In the following essay, Liddell compares Brontë's development with that of her fictional counterpart, Agnes Grey.]

In Emily [Brontë's] birthday paper of 1845 (written a day late, on 31 July) Anne wrote: 'I have begun the third volume of Passages from the Life of an Individual. I wish I had finished it.' This is reasonably conjectured to have been her novel Agnes Grey, which was sent to the publisher a year later, or an earlier draft of it.

Anne is profoundly depressed: 'I for my part cannot well be flatter or older in mind than I am now.' She has recently returned to Haworth, thankful to have left her position as governess with the Robinson family at Thorp Green, but deeply distressed by Branwell's dismissal from the position of tutor in the same house, only a fortnight before. She is also unhappy for other reasons that she has not revealed. We do not know how deeply she had cared for her father's curate, William Weightman (d. 1842), but for long she had mourned his loss, and he would not be there to enliven life at Haworth:

The lightest heart that I haye known,
The kindest I shall ever know.

For Anne there seems to have been no more escape into the romantic fictions of Gondal—'The Gondals are not in first-rate playing condition'—although the same day Emily could write: 'The Gondals flourish bright as ever…. We intend sticking by the rascals as long as they delight us, which I am glad to say they do at present.'

Anne was to spend the winter at Haworth, with the drugged and drunken Branwell as another inmate of the parsonage. 'Ever since her experiences at Thorp Green she exhibited in all she wrote a view of life, much more realistic and more socially orientated.'¹ In this view: 'All true histories contain instruction'—and Agnes Grey certainly does, though it is not literally true as autobiography.

It is the story of a young girl who goes out as a governess in the hope of helping her clerical family, ruined by financial loss. Anne had gone out as a governess six years before, in April 1839.

It will be well, in each of her situations, to isolate Anne's own experience (so far as it is known) from the experience of Agnes in the novel, sometimes too readily identified with it. This will be important in the case of her time at Thorp Green, a period so critical to herself and her brother.

Anne first went to Blake Hall, Mirfield, to the Inghams, a well-established Yorkshire family. They had young and undisciplined children, and Charlotte wrote that her life there was 'one struggle of life-wearing exertion to keep the children in anything like decent order.' There, though 'harassed and exiled', she kept up her own courage; it is related that she was once found writing at a table, with two small Inghams tied to two of the legs. She remained there for about a year, and her dismissal was disguised as a separation by mutual consent; thereafter she was remembered in the family as 'ungrateful', a typical employer's word.

Agnes Grey's first situation was at Wellwood with the Bloomfield family; it is strange that Anne should have given them so aristocratic a name, for she has otherwise revenged herself on her first employers, by making Mr Bloomfield a 'retired tradesman', a vulgar and violent person of whom even his wife was in terror. Mrs Bloomfield was 'cold, grave and forbidding'; but the children, Tom and Mary Ann, whom Agnes was expected to call 'Master' and 'Miss' Bloomfield were very lively, not to say unruly. We do not know if all Tom Bloomfield's hideous cruelty to birds is fact or fiction. Anne, with the love of animals that characterized all three sisters, might almost automatically attribute such conduct to a child that she was holding up to execration. She was even over-successful, for she inspired George Moore to invent a further atrocity²: 'the incident [not in the book] of the little boy, who tears a bird's nest out of some bushes, and fixes hooks into the beaks of the young birds so that he may drag them about the stableyard.'

Agnes Grey was (like her creator and all the Brontës) without the virtue that Jane Austen called 'candour': the gift of seeing the better side of other people's words or actions. Overhearing the grandmother asking Mrs Bloomfield if Agnes were a 'proper person' to have charge of the children—a reasonable grandmotherly enquiry—she was 'satisfied' that the old lady's evident sympathy for her had been 'hypocritical and insincere', and scorned to make herself agreeable by the small attentions and enquiries that were appropriate in their respective situations, as 'flattery' was against her principles.

Agnes's miserable life at Wellwood (we may hope) is now the lot of few people, though an analogous and very disagreeable experience must be endured by many a teacher in charge of large and haphazardly assembled classes:

… the misery of being charged with the care and direction of a set of mischievous turbulent rebels, whom his utmost exertions cannot bind to their duty; while, at the same time, he is responsible for their conduct to a higher power, who exacts from him what cannot be achieved without the aid of the superior's more potent authority; which, either from indolence, or the fear of becoming unpopular with the said rebellious gang, the latter refuses to give. (Chapter 4)

Those who administer what the Gondals might call 'Palaces of Instruction', may still treat their teachers (who are sometimes better educated than themselves) with no more consideration than governesses habitually received from their employers. Teachers, however, generally live outside; and even within school they may be helped and comforted by the loyalty of their colleagues. Nevertheless I have been told of classes in a lycée who were literally the death of their instructors; and there is no sign that discipline among the young is improving. Agnes's history still contains 'instruction'.

A governess, seldom required to produce proof of being well educated (not so easy to do in a time before degrees), might owe her appointment entirely to her recommendation as 'the daughter of a gentleman'. It was therefore necessary for her to insist on her 'gentry', as it was her one qualification. Those who would not have hired her without it were seldom prepared, once she was in their employ, to treat her as a lady, and as part of the family. Jane Austen's 'poor Miss Taylor' was deservedly respected, but her good fortune was exceptional. Nor need we think, complacently, that the almost proverbial experiences of the governess were 'old, unhappy, faroff things'. In the inter-war years I knew a household where the mistress had a new governess almost every year; her husband, a most amiable, retired military man, said to me, about the governesses' awkward position: 'they're like fellers risen from the ranks.'

Women in their walk of life were particularly exposed to snubs. An employer needed to be scrupulously polite, with the attention that Fénelon recommends almost as a further refinement of charity: 'que notre charity soit toujours attentive pour ne pas blesser le prochain. Sans cette attention la charité, qui est si fragile en cette vie, se perd bientôt. Un mot dit avec hauteur, un air sec ou dédaigneux peut altérer les esprits foibles….' Charlotte and Anne were 'esprits foibles' in this sense, if anyone were, and only too prone to take "attention' for condescension. Anne never applied her talents as a satirist to herself.

It appears that Anne probably went to her second situation in May 1840. She went to Thorp Green Hall, near York, to be governess to the three Misses Robinson, Lydia, Elizabeth and Mary, and to coach the boy Edmund in Latin. The Revd Edmund Robinson did not exercise his holy orders. At the time of Anne's arrival he was an enthusiastic member of the local hunt; but his health declined, and he was an invalid at the time of her departure. When after four months Anne wished to change her situation, she was induced to stay on; and when it was desired to provide a tutor for Edmund early in 1843, she arranged for Branwell to fill that post. She had a month's holiday at Christmas, and another in June, and after it accompanied the Robinsons on their yearly summer holiday to Scarborough. It is impossible to form a reliable portrait of Mrs Robinson, confused as we must be by the lyricism of Branwell and the recklessness of Mrs Gaskell. It is probable that there was (or appeared to be) a guilty relationship between her and Branwell from the beginning of 1845, and that Anne was greatly upset by it. She noted later that she had had some 'very unpleasant and undreamt of experiences of human nature', but did not reveal what they were.

On 17 July Edmund was brought by a servant to join his parents at Scarborough. The same day Mr Robinson wrote a letter to Branwell, who had returned to Haworth, sternly dismissing him, and threatening him with exposure. We do not know with what proceedings, 'bad beyond expression', Mr Robinson meant to charge Branwell, but these can hardly have included misconduct with his wife. It looks as though Mrs Robinson were acting with her husband in the dismissal of Branwell³ (who may have been becoming a nuisance, even a threat), though she did later send him money. It was a convenient moment to get rid of him, and the letter may have been mere bluster; Branwell would have crumpled up under any accusation, and was in no position to defend himself.

Anne's friendly relations with her pupils were maintained by a recommenced correspondence; the effect of this was to give her matter for thought on 'love, marriage, sin and its results and man's ultimate destiny',⁴ which bore fruit in her novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

After some months at home, Agnes set out for a second situation. She was to be governess in the family of Mr and Mrs Murray at Horton Lodge, where there were no nursery children, and many of the horrors of Wellwood were absent. The Murrays do not throw much light on Anne's employers at Thorp Green, and perhaps she had reason to avoid saying much about them. Mr Murray was 'a blustering, roistering country squire', usually on horseback, as Mr Robinson may have been at first. Mrs Murray was 'a handsome dashing lady of forty'. All she seemed to require from the governess was showy accomplishment for the girls, and as much Latin grammar as possible for the boys to prepare them for school—all to be acquired with the minimum of exertion on the part of the children.

Agnes, as she herself tells us, was 'the only person in the house who steadily professed good principles, habitually spoke the truth, and generally endeavoured to make inclination bow to duty.' Rosalie, the elder daughter,

… had never been perfectly taught the distinction between right and wrong; she had, like her brothers and sisters, been suffered, from infancy, to tyrannize over nurses, governesses, and servants; she had not

been taught to moderate her desires, to control her temper, or bridle her will, or to sacrifice her own pleasure for the good of others. Her temper being naturally good, she was never violent or morose … (Chapter 7)

Indeed she came to have some esteem and even affection for Agnes.

As for the younger girl:

As an animal, Matilda was all right, full of life, vigour and activity; as an intelligent being, she was barbarously ignorant, indocile, careless and irrational; and, consequently, very distressing to one who had the task of cultivating her understanding…. As a moral agent, Matilda was reckless, headstrong, violent, and unamenable to reason.

She swore like a trooper, but she was truthful, whereas Rosalie was capable of artfulness.

The elder boy, John, was almost eleven when Agnes came to Horton Lodge: 'frank and good-natured in the main', but 'unruly, unprincipled, untaught, unteachable'. He was sent to school after a year. Charles, the second boy, was spoilt by his mother: 'a pettish, cowardly, capricious, selfish little fellow', impossible to teach under his mother's eye, and Agnes's worst trial. He followed John to school a year later.

This was a world tolerable, if compared with Wellwood, and Agnes remained for more than four years. Her pupils were insolent, unmannerly and inconsiderate; they cared nothing for order or regularity, had meals or lessons when it pleased them, and obliged Agnes to submit to their lack of programme. But they were too old for the violence of the young Bloomfields.

Agnes was maturer than she had been at Blake Hall; her life had taught her to submit with more humility to its various indignities, and she can report with humour Mrs Murray's little sermon on 'the meek and quiet spirit, which St Matthew, or one of them says is better than the putting on of apparel.'

If she is to be judged as she judges others, the verdict on Agnes will be just but severe. She was aware that some of her sufferings were her own fault:

I frequently caught cold by sitting on the damp grass, or from exposure to the evening dew, or some insidious draught, which seemed to have no injurious effect on them [her pupils]…. But I must not blame them for what was, perhaps, my own fault; for I never made any particular objections to sitting where they pleased; foolishly choosing to risk the consequences rather than trouble them for my convenience. (Chapter 7)

Agnes seems to have been something of a hypochondriac, for her uncomfortable position in the family carriage, 'crushed into the corer farthest from the open window', and with her back to the horses, during a drive of only two miles to church on Sundays, might make her sick, and must be followed by a depressing headache.

She was unwilling to give her pupils credit for the better motives which in part influenced their behaviour. When the Misses Murray would 'amuse themselves with visiting the poor cottagers on their father's estate, to receive their flattering homage', it is conceded that their object might also be 'perhaps to enjoy the purer pleasure of making the poor people happy with their cheering presence and their occasional gifts, so easily bestowed, so thankfully received'. But without meaning to offend, the girls behaved very rudely on many such occasions.

Agnes's chief unhappiness came from living with 'unprincipled' people and she had a longing for persons of her own sort. (As we, worse corrupted by 'evil communications' may sometimes have a nostalgia for 'good' people—if we have ever known any.) Presently she was to be gratified. The rector, Mr Hatfield, however, was not likely to be of any comfort to her with his 'high and dry' sermons about such matters as church discipline and the apostolic succession.

It must be admitted that Agnes (rightly unashamed of her 'principles') wore them a little too ostentatiously, was too quick to reproach conduct that was no business of hers, and had not been offered for her approval. At a grand ball, Rosalie had danced with 'Lord F.', who obviously admired her: 'I had the pleasure of seeing his nasty cross wife ready to perish with spite and vexation.' Agnes, from whom only a civil smile was required, cried, 'Oh, Miss Murray! you don't mean to say that such a thing could really give you pleasure….' Rosalie answered good-humouredly: 'Well, I know it's very wrong; but never mind! I mean to be good some time—only don't preach now, there's a good creature.'

A new curate, Edward Weston, arrived; he preached evangelical sermons and read the service with reverence. Agnes soon met him, for sometimes when she was free she went to read to a cottager, Nancy Brown, whose sight was failing. One day Mr Weston appeared with Nancy's cat in his arms, having rescued it from the gamekeeper. At last Agnes had found a congenial spirit, and very soon he occupied much of her thought, though it would seem that he was not a recreation of William Weightman, from whom he is not only differentiated by his evangelicalism, but also by his seriousness and his physical characteristics.

Rosalie, of course, began to imagine a flirtation between the curate and the governess, of which there was none, though Agnes's heart had been touched. Rosalie herself, who was quite heartless, was half engaged to Sir Thomas Ashby, the most eligibile parti thereabouts, a debauchee, but a baronet, and the owner of a fine house and park. Meanwhile she amused herself by captivating poor Mr Hatfield the rector, a gallant and personable man, but without the means and the social position that Miss Murray thought her due. Agnes was sometimes posted as a watchdog by Mrs Murray, but Rosalie could always find ways of avoiding her and carrying on a flirtation. Unfortunately the rector was so much encouraged that he 'presumed' to make an offer of marriage, and had to be sent about his business.

Rosalie missed his attentions; she was now without an admirer, and decided to 'fix' Mr Weston. The unhappy Agnes took this with immense seriousness. "'Oh God, avert it!" I cried internally—"for his sake, not for mine."' Anne Brontë's next heroine, Helen Graham, will be too sophisticated to offer half-sincere explanations to the Almighty—and will have more knowledge of herself and others, and more sense of humour.

Rosalie became a frequent visitor to the cottage, where she hoped to meet the curate. She stole Agnes's seat in church, which commanded a view of the pulpit, to which Agnes must now turn her back; and chance meetings were arranged from which the governess was excluded.

There was as yet no reason to suppose that Mr Weston's happiness at all depended on Rosalie Murray or on Agnes Grey, but the latter's thought was full of him.

Besides my hope in God, my only consolation was in thinking that, though he knew it not, I was more worthy of his love than Rosalie Murray, charming and engaging as she was; for I could appreciate his excellence, which she could not: I would devote my life to the promotion of his happiness; she would destroy his happiness for the momentary gratification of her own vanity. (Chapter 17)

She also found it natural to 'seek relief in poetry', whether in 'the effusions of others, which seem to harmonize with our existing case or in attempts to give utterance to these thoughts and feelings….' She quotes one specimen: 'cold and languid as the lines may seem, it was almost a passion of grief to which they owed their being.'

Oh, they have robbed me of the hope
My spirit held so dear;
They will not let me hear that voice
My soul delights to hear.

This undateable poem⁵ raises several problems. It would appear to have been written before Weightman's death (September 1842), and 'the question of the identity of the "they" is not easily soluble.'⁶ It has been suggested⁷ that the occasion of these lines was the return of Anne to her situation at Thorp Green early in 1842. She had again intended to relinquish it, and may have hoped to remain at Haworth to keep house during her sisters' absence at school in Brussels (and perhaps to enjoy the society of Weightman). 'They' will then be her employers, who had entreated her to return, and perhaps her father.

The poem fits perfectly into its present position; 'they' are Rosalie Murray and her sister, who prevent Agnes from meeting Edward Weston. Though probably written for Weightman, it is now used for an imaginary character—thus, like other novelists, Anne can make use of the past.

Rosalie married, and travelled abroad with Sir Thomas Ashby. Agnes consequently was more thrown with Matilda, whom her mother was trying to have groomed into young ladyhood; unfortunately the governess's precepts and prohibitions went no way with the girl. Agnes had to endure some reprimands from Mrs Murray:

The young lady's proficiency and elegance is of more consequence to the governess than her own, as well as to the world. If she wishes to prosper in her vocation she must devote all her energies … to the accomplishment of that one object…. The judicious governess knows this: she knows that, while she lives in obscurity herself, her pupil's virtues and defects will be open to every eye; and that, unless she loses sight of herself in their cultivation, she need not hope for success. (Chapter 18)

Matilda, however, yielded in some degree to her mother's authority. It was the circumstances of her own life that made Agnes offer her resignation. She was called home by her father's illness, but got back too late to see him alive. She and her mother then formed the project of opening a school, with 'a few young ladies to board and educate', and as many day pupils as they could get. Agnes was to return to Horton Lodge after a short vacation to give notice of her final departure. During her last weeks there she had to say goodbye to Mr Weston, who also was leaving the place; she built fancies on his few and correct words. For some time afterwards she suffered from poor health, and low spirits, although she had achieved half of what would be a Brontë happy ending: a small independent school in partnership with a member of her own family, and in 'A -, the fashionable watering-place', that is in Scarborough particularly dear to Anne.

Her former pupil Rosalie, now Lady Ashby, invited her to stay at Ashby Park, where her unhappiness and boredom in the married state, despite her splendid surroundings, sent Agnes back with more satisfaction to her own house and duties. During the summer Mr Weston, now vicar of a neighbouring parish, appeared on the sands—and not long afterwards a final happy ending was achieved in his marriage with Agnes Grey.

The time at Thorp Green, so important in Anne's development, is very insufficiently documented. We can see at once that 'Agnes Grey' could not have written The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. 'Those', says one writer, 'who insist that life with the Murrays of Horton Lodge is an accurate picture of life with the Robinsons of Thorp Green must follow the story through to its conclusion, and find the model for Henry Weston (sic)….'⁸ Why should they not stop before he comes in? And in any case he was 'Edward' not 'Henry'. Another writer, Winifred Gérin, who does identify the experiences of Agnes closely with those of Anne Brontë is at least obliged to mention the difference in composition between the Robinson and the Murray families. But she says, astonishingly: 'To read Wildfell Hall in the light of Anne's and Branwell's experiences at Thorp Green is the only way to realise the book's true purpose and inspiration—which was not the story of Branwell's downfall, but of the world that made such a downfall possible.'⁹ We knew Branwell well enough before he went there in 1843 to imagine that no place could make his downfall improbable.

We know very little about life at Thorp Green. Until the last year Anne seems to have been ready (if not always contented) to withdraw from time to time her attempts at leaving. It was the first time she had had to share her life with people of a different sort; at Blake Hall she had been little more than a nursery governess, and further excluded from family life. Here she had to adjust herself to life with persons who had not her 'principles', to live in what (compared with Haworth) must have been a more 'permissive' society. If we judge not only from the book, but from her later friendship with her two younger pupils, we can feel that she had won a certain admiration by her steadiness; she must have been rather impressive.

The Revd Edmund Robinson did not exercise his holy orders; nevertheless he was locally respected, and must have been enough of a clergyman to have an orderly house. Anne, some two years after her employment there, arranged for Branwell to be engaged as tutor for the boy Edmund, and a year after his appointment Charlotte could write: 'Anne and Branwell are both wondrously valued in their situations.' Life at Thorp Green does not appear to have been at all like that at Grassdale Manor, the home of the profligate Arthur Huntingdon in The Tenant It is elsewhere that Branwell had learned to drink.

We do not know much more if we try to identify Mrs Robinson with Mrs Murray in Agnes Grey, though she is called 'a handsome, dashing lady of forty'; Arabella Lowborough, the adulteress in Wildfell Hall went 'dashing on for a season' after her abandonment—I do not know if we may associate the two characters. If the children (as we are told) threatened their mother 'to tell papa about Mr Brontë' there must have been at least some indiscretion; and it is not certain that Mr Robinson was perfectly faithful to his wife. Something must have gone wrong in 1845, when Anne had those 'unpleasant experiences'.

Anne had the precious support of organized religion, without which her 'principles' might not have availed. It was the religion to which, no doubt, the Robinsons paid some sort of allegiance, of which Mr Robinson was a minister, and to whose charities Mrs Robinson contributed. In her own strong position Anne could live as an innocent in a rather unedifying world, and become felt as a moral influence. Her own evangelical position was becoming more assured, and she was to have a reformative purpose in writing her second novel, which was not yet developed in Agnes Grey.

Notes

¹ Chitham and Winnifrith, Facts and Problems, p. 92

² Cit. Ada Harrison and Derek Stanford, Anne Brontë: Her Life and Work, 1959, pp. 227-8

³ Winifred Gérin, Branwell Brontë, 1961, pp. 240ff

⁴ Edward Chitham, The Poems of Anne Brontë, 1979, p. 14

⁵ Ibid., no. 12

⁶ Ibid., p. 171

⁷ Harrison and Stanford, Anne Brontë, pp. 78f

⁸ Daphne du Maurier, The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë, 1972, p. 148

⁹ Gérin, Branwell Brontë, p. 317.