Anne Bront: the sister who got there first

Seen as less passionate than Emily, less accomplished than Charlotte, Anne is often overlooked. But her governess Agnes Grey is a clear model for Jane Eyre

Anne Brontë started writing her first novel some time between 1840 and 1845 while she was working as a governess for the Robinson family, at Thorp Green near York. I imagine she must have made her excuses in the evenings, and escaped the drawing room, where she had to do the boring bits of her pupils’ sewing, and often felt awkward and humiliated – excluded from the conversation because she was not considered a lady, yet not allowed to sit with the servants either, because governesses had to be something of a lady, or how could they teach their pupils to be ladies?

Anne must have stolen away to her room and pulled out her small, portable writing desk. Leaning on the desk’s writing slope (which was decadently lined in pink velvet), Anne could go on with her novel. She had to write in secret because she was skewering her haughty employers and her peremptory pupils on the page. Although her job was difficult and thankless, she had realised that it was providing her with excellent material, that she was telling a story no one else was telling. As she laboured away in her neat, elegant handwriting, Anne must have felt that she was writing a novel that would go off like a bomb.

Agnes Grey sticks close to the facts of Anne’s life. The eponymous heroine is a clergyman’s daughter, just as Anne’s father, Patrick Brontë, was the perpetual curate of Haworth in Yorkshire. Anne doesn’t specify where Agnes grows up, but she does say she was “born and nurtured among ... rugged hills”, so when I read the novel, I imagine the Yorkshire moors. Both Anne and Agnes were originally one of six children. Anne lost her two eldest sisters when she was five. Agnes has lost even more siblings; she and her older sister Mary are the only two who have “survived the perils of infancy”. Both Agnes and Anne are the youngest. When Agnes says she is frustrated because she is “always regarded as the child, and the pet of the family”, considered “too helpless and dependent – too unfit for buffeting with the cares and turmoils of life”, it feels like Anne talking. She always chafed at being patronised.

Anne grew up poor. Agnes’s family are not rich to begin with, but things really get desperate when her father Richard loses their meagre savings on a dodgy investment and slumps into depression. So the women take over. Agnes’s capable, enterprising mother Alice slashes their expenses. Then they start working out how they might make more money. Mary goes for the most genteel work she can find: she starts selling her watercolours. Agnes turns to one of the only other jobs open to middle-class women: she decides to become a governess. Her family scoff that she’s much too young, but she persuades them. She arrives at her first job, with the Bloomfield family (in real life, they were the Inghams), feeling a “rebellious flutter” of excitement. But instead of an adventure, Agnes gets a crash course in how cruel the world can be, and how it got that way.

One of Agnes’s pupils, Tom Bloomfield, enjoys torturing birds. One day his vile uncle, who encourages Tom’s cruelty, gives him a nest of baby birds. When Agnes sees him “laying the nest on the ground, and standing over it with his legs wide apart, his hands thrust into his breeches-pockets, his body bent forward, and his face twisted into all manner of contortions in the ecstasy of his delight” and he won’t be reasoned with, something rises within her. She grabs a large flat stone and crushes the birds flat.

This brutal mercy killing is almost too violent to read. Agnes Grey’s first critics thought it went too far, but Anne insisted that “Agnes Grey was accused of extravagant overcolouring in those very parts that were carefully copied from life, with a most scrupulous avoidance of all exaggeration”. And when the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell asked Anne’s sister Charlotte if the scene with the nestlings had really happened, Charlotte replied that no one who had not been a governess really knew the dark side of so-called respectable human nature.

Anne was after more than shock value; she wanted to show that Tom’s cruelty was sanctioned, even encouraged, by his family. Agnes realises that Tom’s cruelty is all of a piece; whether he is torturing birds, hitting his sisters or kicking his governess, he wants to “persecute the lower creation”, because he sees women, girls and defenceless animals as his to exploit, abuse and oppress. After months of being wrongfooted, slighted, dissatisfied, bored, overworked, underpaid and out of her depth – Agnes Grey is brilliant on the peculiar horrors of a first job – Agnes has started to understand how the world works. Her consciousness has been raised. And then she is fired.

Anne was fired from her first job too. Undaunted, she boldly advertised for a job asking for double her previous salary, and was soon working for the Robinsons. The Robinsons’ fictional counterparts are the Murrays, and Agnes mainly teaches their two daughters. The youngest, Matilda, is a tomboy, who is just as cruel in her way as Tom Bloomfield. When she gleefully lets her dog savage a baby hare, it’s clear that in resisting the pressure to be ladylike she has tipped into wanting to be as violent and careless as the men around her. The eldest, Rosalie, is being pushed into marriage with a rich man who happens also to be a rake and philanderer, and while she can she is determined to flirt with every man in sight. Agnes finds it hard to sympathise when Rosalie decides to break the heart of the new curate, Mr Weston, especially as she quite likes him herself.

Oh, Mr Weston. He’s kind, he’s generous and he speaks from the heart. Agnes is at her most endearing when she is falling for Mr Weston. He offers her an umbrella, and she’s so flustered that all she can say is: “No, thank you, I don’t mind the rain.” The older Agnes acerbically remarks: “I always lacked common sense when taken by surprise.” Agnes’s battle with Rosalie over Mr Weston could come out of a Jane Austen novel. I’m sure Anne read Austen, and admired how mercilessly she satirised those who were obsessed with status, rank and class. Rosalie thinks she can steal Mr Weston from Agnes, because, like Tom Bloomfield, she also thinks she has the right to “persecute the lower creation”. The Murrays are disrespectful to Agnes, making her feel “like one deaf and dumb who could neither speak nor be spoken to”; as though she has “ceased to be visible”. Anne’s evocation of this, and how it eats away at her sense of self, has the tang of lived experience.

Anne stuck it out with the Robinsons for five years. She only left because she made the mistake of persuading them to employ her feckless brother, Branwell, as tutor to their son and he spectacularly messed up by having an affair with Mrs Robinson. In her prayerbook, Anne wrote that she was “sick of mankind and their disgusting ways”. When she resigned, she carried home, tucked away in her portable writing desk, a work in progress she was calling “Passages in the Life of an Individual”. This would become Agnes Grey.

Back in Haworth, Anne found all her siblings at home and unemployed. Her brother was convinced he’d lost the love of his life and was drowning his sorrows at the local pub. But Anne and her sisters decided to use a legacy from their aunt to write, and to publish a joint book of poetry together. They used pen names starting with the same letters as their real names. Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell was published in 1846. It only sold two copies. But by then the sisters had started writing every day again, just as they had as children when they had composed wild, fantastical stories and poems, set in their own imaginary worlds.

Anne wrote, walked the moors, did her share of the housework and wrote some more. Every night, she and her sisters paced round and round the dining room table, reading their work aloud and offering criticism and ideas. As Anne reworked “Passages in the Life of an Individual” into Agnes Grey, Emily wrote Wuthering Heights and Charlotte wrote her first novel, The Professor. Soon they were sending out all three manuscripts, wrapped in brown paper. They were rejected again and again.

Later that year, Charlotte was in Manchester, looking after her father as he recuperated from an operation, when she started a second novel. Back home, she started reading aloud what she’d written – and Anne must have been quite surprised. Like Agnes Grey, Jane Eyre was also about a plain heroine, who was also a governess, and who also spoke directly to the reader. Later, a story would spring up about Charlotte telling her sisters that she was going to break new ground and portray a heroine who wasn’t beautiful. But Anne had got there first. The moment where Agnes gazes forlornly into her mirror and can “discover no beauty in those marked features” is one of the most heartfelt in the novel, and pre-empts Jane calling herself “poor, obscure, plain and little”.

One reason Agnes Grey has never received the acclaim it should have done is that Charlotte’s novel came out first. Charlotte had managed to find a decent, efficient publisher, while her sisters had unfortunately signed their novels over to a chancer called Thomas Cautley Newby. He dragged his heels until Jane Eyre became a bestseller, at which point he realised he might make some money out of publishing two more novels by the mysterious Bell family. So Anne’s first novel came out in December 1847, along with Wuthering Heights, two months after Charlotte’s. Agnes Grey was reviewed as a pale imitation of Jane Eyre. One critic even unwittingly guessed at the sisters’ relationship by saying Agnes was “a sort of younger sister to Jane Eyre”, adding, upsettingly, that she was “inferior to her in every way”. The critics of the day barely noticed Anne’s political engagement – her sharp portrait of a class-ridden society, or her argument that when education is not valued, children grow up ill-equipped for life, unable to be happy or kind. Anne had written an exposé of governessing, in contrast to Charlotte’s highly romanticised view of the profession. The reports of the Governesses’ Benevolent Institution, a charity set up to help governesses in 1841, make it clear that very few real governesses were blessed, like Jane Eyre, with a handsome, intelligent boss, a motherly housekeeper and just one sweet pupil. Agnes’s experience was much closer to the truth, and many women had an even worse time of it. Charlotte hated governessing and in her letters she railed against its petty humiliations, backbreaking work and appalling pay. But none of that made it into her novel. Anne wanted her novel to speak to some of the 25,000 women working as governesses in the 1840s and to their employers too. Instead, Jane Eyre became the governess novel.

Agnes is a quieter heroine than Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights’s Cathy Earnshaw, but she burns with her own anger. Agnes Grey is often a furious novel, and a feminist novel. Its main concern is how a woman can do what Agnes wants to do at the start: “to go out into the world; to act for myself; to exercise my unused faculties; to try my own unknown powers”. It asks big questions: how can you search for empowerment when the world is cruel and unfair, and the odds are stacked against you? Can you get what you want without hurting other people in the process? How can you find love? Which brings me back to Mr Weston. It’s striking that, while Anne’s sisters created heroes who were dark, brooding and malevolent, Anne provided her heroine with a hero who was actually nice to women. This still feels revolutionary.

A new Vintage Classics edition of Agnes Grey is published on 12 January. Take Courage: Anne Brontë and the Art of Life by Samantha Ellis is published by Chatto & Windus on the same date.

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