SOURCE: "Acton Bell," in Anne Brontë, revised ed., Allen Lane, 1976, pp. 209-34.

[In the following excerpt, originally published in 1959, Gérin summarizes the facts of Brontë's composition of Agnes Grey and the early critical reception of the novel.]

Anne Brontë's own copy of Agnes Grey (it was a compact volume of 363 pages), which is preserved in Princeton University Library, is full of the author's corrections of … numerous errors.¹ One can imagine her sitting, with bowed head, the light of the lamp falling on her pretty hair, absorbed in her task. Agnes Grey was published in one volume; it had not the breadth to take up two like Emily's Wuthering Heights, far less three, like Charlotte's Jane Eyre. Yet it held in its modest dimensions a perfection of its own.

"Agnes Grey," wrote Charlotte a week after the book had come out, "is the mirror of the mind of the writer." She could not have more exactly defined its worth. Though Agnes Grey may have fallen into relative obscurity nowadays it must not be forgotten that in George Moore's opinion it was "the most perfect prose narrative in English literature… . As simple and beautiful as a muslin dress … the one story in English literature in which style, characters and subject are in perfect keeping."²

These are high claims indeed and worth recalling in any attempt to assess the book's lasting worth.

Agnes Grey, as its original title shows, had been begun as an autobiography. Its value today is still permanently enhanced by the fact that it relates, with startling adherence to truth, the circumstances of Anne's two experiences as governess.

For good or for ill, Anne did not leave it there. The artist within her took charge and the book, begun with one intention, had very soon far exceeded it and become a full-scale work of fiction.

Not full-scale in the sense of bulk; one of Agnes Grey's chief merits is its exquisite proportions. It is well proportioned as a French interior is well proportioned, with each article of furniture on so small yet perfect a scale that no object appears crowded or overwhelmed by its fellows.

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.

So the author, at least, would have us believe. But the sadness of Anne's own experience in love broods over the tale and makes us rather doubt the ordering of the facts at the story's close. They are so very lightly sketched in, with none of the bite and incision of outline in which the exposition and middle of the book are etched, that one sees them as through a mist, only partially discernible.

That does not diminish their charm. There is, indeed, an elegiac charm pervading the whole of the latter half of the book, from Chapter 13 to the end, which fully makes up for the loss of the vivacity and humour of the opening. But the difference is there. Agnes Grey is a book that falls in two, not only because it is partautobiographical and part-fictional, but because, written over a period of probably at least three years, it reflects the tragic change in Anne's circumstances.

It seems likely that she began writing Passages in the Life of an Individual in her second year at Thorp Green, in 1842. She may even have begun it much earlier, during the interregnum at home following her dismissal from the Inghams. Whenever it was, she could still view her experiences at Blake Hall with enough humour to derive an artistic satisfaction from their narration. The opening chapters of the book, all those relating to Blake Hall indeed, are instinct with satirical observation and, what is rarer far, with a sense of humour as regards her own failures and distresses. The style is elastic and reveals a cheerful mind "full of bright hopes and ardent expectations".

It is this section of the book, the first six chapters in particular, in which Anne showed herself, to quote George Moore again, to have not only all Jane Austen's qualities but some others as well. (Her true literary progenitors, one is tempted to suggest, were Goldsmith and Maria Edgeworth; for she probably never read Jane Austen any more than Charlotte had done.)

Her time for writing would be very limited once she was fully engaged in teaching at Thorp Green. With the tragic autumn of 1842 and the death of Willy Weightman, a burden so great was added to her already flagging spirits that the zest and animation went out of her writing, however much she needed writing of some sort to absorb her. But all the delight was gone. There is observation as sharp of the Murray family as of the Bloomfields, but bitterness has replaced the good humour, and disappointment effectually dimmed the youthful ardour. The opening chapters of Agnes Grey are the work of a young person, still full of sanguine hopes; the latter half betrays the effort of a stricken heart.³

An identical circumstance attended the composition of Shirley and left similar indelible traces of the conflicting states of mind in which it was written, but Charlotte, unlike Anne, had by the time she was writing her third novel achieved a greater mastery of her medium. Time which militated in favour of Charlotte was to be so cruelly lacking for the development of Anne. There is tantalising promise in both her books of the master-piece that should have come thereafter.

Agnes Grey is as different from Wildfell Hall as two books by one and the same author can well be, yet unmistakably they are from the same pen: an uncompromising honesty invests both tales.

This quality it is which gives Agnes Grey its distinctive value. It is the honesty of the author which insists upon that self-analysis of the heroine's feelings and motives which constitutes not only the book's originality but its truth. Character described from without is one thing—and Anne was to show herself a mistress at tersely satirical portraiture—but that which is revealed to us, by growing degrees, from within, is far more rare and nearer the movement of life. Though the plot of Agnes Grey is too static to arouse keen excitement in the reader, there is nothing static in the characters. The flux of feeling, the uncertainty of temper, the deteriorating effect of time, it is these considerations that hold our attention and make us wonder right to the very end how the characters will finally resolve their problems.

The literary qualities of the book are best judged by their appropriateness; the style suits the matter, and though Anne always excelled in purely descriptive passages—her loving eye for all aspects of the natural scene being perfectly matched by her fastidious choice of language—there is no writing for the sake of writing.

The book is rich in such observation of character as the following:

"Mr Bloomfield," she writes of her first employer, "was a retired tradesman who had realised a very comfortable fortune, but could not be prevailed upon to give a greater salary than £25 to the instructress of his children."

Here is the grandmother of the Bloomfield family—"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."

For a parson's daughter the following sketch of a worldly cleric is full of savour. "Mr Hatfield would come sailing up the aisle, or rather sweeping along like a whirlwind, with his rich silk gown flying behind him and rustling against the pew doors, mount the pulpit like a conqueror ascending his triumphal car; then, sinking on the velvet cushion in an attitude of studied grace, remain in silent prostration for a certain time… "

So much of the psychological interest of Agnes Grey derives from the personal experience of the author that the tendency is to consider it rather in its autobiographical than in its literary connection. It is part of Anne's quality, however, that though she told nothing but the truth, by the force of imagination she seemed to be inventing, and it is Agnes Grey with whom readers are concerned, not Anne Brontë.

Its essential truthfulness no competent critic has ever doubted. Charlotte Brontë,. stung by Lewes's accusations of extravagance and improbability in her own Jane Eyre, wrote of Agnes Grey to her publishers: "Agnes Grey should please such critics as Mr Lewes for it is 'true' and 'unexaggerated' enough."⁴ As the reviewer in Douglas Jerrolds' Weekly wrote: "The author, if not a governess, must have bribed some governess very largely, either with love or money, to reveal to him the secrets of her prison house … ," so convincingly did Acton Bell set forth "the minute torments and incessant tediums" of her situation.⁵

In this respect one near-contemporary reader's views are peculiarly worth recording. Lady Amberley noted in her diary for 1868: "read Agnes Grey, one of the Brontës, and should like to give it to every family with a governess and shall read it through again when I have a governess to remind me to be human."⁶

In due course the professional reviews arrived at the parsonage, regularly forwarded to the authors by Mr Newby. The discerning critic on Douglas Jerrolds' Weekly was of opinion that Agnes Grey was a tale "well worth the writing and the reading"; that on Britannia (who had a mind to discern sublimity in Wuthering Heights) found nothing to call for special notice in Agnes Grey, but conceded that "some characters and scenes" were nicely sketched in.

It was the writer on The Atlas who gave Emily's and Anne's novels the most exhaustive review. As was inevitable, he compared the two productions. Agnes Grey he found "more level and more sunny. Perhaps", he added, "we should best describe it as a somewhat coarse imitation of Miss Austin's [sic] charming stories". It did not offend "by any startling improbabilities", and he found the incidents relating to the governess's life "such as might happen to anyone in that situation of life and, doubtless, have happened to many. The story, though lacking the power and originality of Wuthering Heights, is infinitely more agreeable. It leaves no painful impression on the mind—some may think it leaves no impression at all. We are not quite sure that the next novel will not efface it." In the last line Anne may have read a challenge which strangely accorded with her then intentions, for, by the time she was reading the Atlas critic's review, she was already engaged on writing her second novel.

Abbreviations

AB

Anne Brontë

AG

Agnes Grey

CB

Charlotte Brontë

WSW

W. S. Williams

BST

Brontë Society Transactions

SLL

The Brontës, Life and Letters

by C. K. Shorter In quoting from Anne Brontë's novels, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the text of [The Brontë Novels, 6 vols., London, in] Smith, Elder and Co's edition of 1900 has been used throughout, but the page references, for the greater convenience of modern readers, apply to the current reprints in the Nelson Classics.

Notes

¹ AB's copy of AG: see Dr Charles A. Huguenin's article on Brontë MSS in Princeton University Library, BST 1955.

² George Moore on AG: see Conversations in Ebury Street, [London, 1930] 214-23.

³ Observation of character: AG, chap. I, 11; chap. IV, 36; chap. X, 79.

⁴ CB to WSW, 14th December 1847, SLL I, 375.

⁵Douglas Jerrolds' Weekly: for the texts of the reviews of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, see E. M. Weir's "Contemporary Reviews of the First Brontë Novels", BST 1947.

⁶ Lady Amberley: quoted from the text in Patricia Thomson's The Victorian Heroine, [Oxford, 1956] 53.