‘How delightful it would be to be a governess!’ thinks Agnes Grey at the start of Anne’s first novel. ‘To go out into the world; to enter upon a new life; to act for myself; to exercise my unused faculties; to try my unknown powers; to earn my own maintenance … And then, how charming to be entrusted with the care and education of children!’ Are the exclamation marks sincere? Is Anne being sarcastic? Everyone knows governesses were overlooked and crushed. But Agnes Grey is not satire. Agnes promises that ‘Shielded by my own obscurity, and 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’. And Anne really was honest in Agnes Grey. She committed to realism. You could film the whole novel without once having recourse to a candelabra or a smoke machine. Inga-Stina Ewbank thought she took it too far, that ‘In her anxiety to picture life that is drab, she sometimes produces art that is dull’. But Anne was also criticised for doing the opposite, and observed with irritation that ‘Agnes Grey was accused of extravagant over-colouring in those very parts that were carefully copied from life, with a most scrupulous avoidance of all exaggeration’. She didn’t need to exaggerate because the truth was shocking enough. But her excitement about starting work isn’t snark because Anne didn’t know it would be grim to be a governess. One reason we know it now is because she wrote about it: when Agnes Grey was published in December 1847, it was the first novel to really lift the lid on the profession.
Even so, her optimism makes me sigh. I don’t want Anne to be the good girl diligently slogging away. It seems more fun to be Charlotte and Branwell, raging and sneering at their bosses, or Emily, hating employment so much that she mostly avoided it. I don’t want Anne to be excited about setting off for her first job in April 1839 when, at the time, all her siblings were at home and writing like the wind.
Charlotte had finally left Roe Head that Christmas, after three and a half years and more than one resignation threat. A few weeks later, Branwell had come home from Bradford, where he had tried and failed to establish himself as a portrait painter. It must have been a blow for Patrick who had scrimped and saved to pay for Branwell’s art lessons and – possibly – to send his son to London to try to get into the Royal Academy in 1836. If Branwell did go, he probably suffered the fate of one of his Angrian heroes, Charles Wentworth, who visits a capital city and, felled by ‘aimless depression’, wanders around, unseeing, and listless, feels as if the cathedral dome will ‘thunder down in ruins over his head’, and is overwhelmed by ‘flashes of feeling’ and ‘striking sparks from his mind’. These sound like symptoms of seizures. Branwell did have seizures – which he might have made worse by, like Wentworth, ‘feeding his feelings with “little squibs of rum”’ – but no one knows when they started. If his seizures began when he was a boy, perhaps that’s why he was never sent to school, and perhaps later they made it hard for him to hold down a job. If Branwell travelled south, nothing came of it. Instead, while his sisters were at Roe Head, he turned one of the Parsonage bedrooms into a studio, and started painting local bigwigs, in between churning out Angrian fantasy, and bombarding the editor of Blackwood’s magazine with peremptory, misspelled letters, one beginning ‘SIR, READ WHAT I WRITE’, another practically illegible because, he explained, he had injured his right hand while boxing and was writing with his left. Unsurprisingly he never got a reply. So when a friend of Patrick’s offered to help him set up a studio in Bradford, it seemed like his best chance at a career. But after six months, he was back. He hadn’t managed to establish himself, he was in debt, and he didn’t know what to do next. And then Emily returned too, from her first – and only – job as a teacher at Law Hill school near Halifax, where she’d had to work seventeen-hour days, and had startled her pupils by telling them she preferred the school dog to any of them. She’d lasted six months.
Charlotte was offered a way out of the job market altogether, when Nussey’s boring brother Henry proposed. She replied with the ultimate iteration of it’s not you, it’s me: ‘I have no personal repugnance to the idea of a union with you,’ she said, ‘– but I feel convinced that mine is not the sort of disposition calculated to form the happiness of a man like you.’ Ironically this letter, in which Charlotte bravely turned down her chance for financial security, recently sold at Christie’s for over fifty thousand dollars.
I start to feel differently about Agnes’s (and Anne’s) optimism. Anne must have had a lot of gumption to leave home in April 1839, at nineteen, to try to do what her older siblings were finding so impossible. All the things Agnes wishes for – to go out in the world, to enter upon a new life, to act for herself, to exercise her unused faculties, to try her unknown powers and to earn her own maintenance – are things I’ve wished for, over the years; things women have fought for the right to do, and are fighting for still.
When Anne left, maybe, like Agnes, she scandalised the servant (yet another character based on Tabby) by kissing the cat goodbye, and put her veil over her face once she was in the gig so she could cry in private. And maybe when she arrived at the Inghams’ (the Bloomfields in the book), she found herself, like Agnes, ‘stilling the rebellious flutter of my heart’. Rebellious flutter is interesting. This is going to be an adventure.
Charlotte, though, told Anne’s departure as a tragedy: ‘Poor child! She left us last Monday; no one went with her; it was her own wish that she might be allowed to go alone, as she thought she could manage better and summon more courage if thrown entirely upon her own resources.’ I wonder if Charlotte was quoting Anne – courage was a word Anne used a lot – and I can’t help feeling that Charlotte’s real anxiety was for herself. Admitting she hadn’t yet found a new job, she joked, ‘I have lately discovered I have quite a talent for cleaning … so, if everything else fails, I can turn my hand to that … I won’t be a cook; I hate cooking. I won’t be a nurserymaid, nor a lady’s-maid, far less a lady’s companion, or a mantua-maker, or a straw-bonnet maker, or a taker-in of plain work. I won’t be anything but a housemaid.’ The banter rings a little hollow; Charlotte’s sister (her poor, little, incapable sister) had beaten her to it.
Anne was the first to be a governess in a family home – Charlotte and Emily had both taught at schools – so she didn’t know what to expect. The Inghams lived at Blake Hall, in Mirfield, not far from Roe Head, and Anne probably got the job through James La Trobe who had christened all five Ingham children. Anne taught seven-year-old Cunliffe and five-year-old Mary, and her salary was £25 a year, which Agnes sharply notes is not much for a wealthy man to pay the person teaching his children. I examine pictures of the Inghams. Joshua Ingham has fulsome sideburns and a supercilious air, while his wife Mary looks phlegmatic in high-maintenance, shiny sausage curls, a vast silk crinoline and a black lace mantilla. I can’t imagine Anne liked Ingham’s politics – he helped enforce the new Poor Law Act in Mirfield, draconian legislation which Patrick campaigned against. He was deeply puritanical, and didn’t let his daughters go to shops, use mirrors or wear perfume. When he caught one girl looking at herself in a mirror, he had all her hair cut off to punish her vanity. His wife notoriously said Anne was a very unsuitable governess who tied the children to a table leg so she could get on with her writing. But Mary only came out with this story when the Brontës were famous so perhaps she told it to get a bit of their refracted glamour. She was wrong to imagine that Anne was doing much writing at Blake Hall. It was only at her second job that she began ‘Passages in the Life of an Individual’ which almost certainly became Agnes Grey.
But Mary Ingham did have good reason to be annoyed with her ex-governess because in the novel her family, thinly disguised, are unsparingly anatomised. Anne noticed everything: when the Inghams treated her shabbily, when they bickered about their children, when they squabbled over food. Blending into the background, into the darkest corner of a church, into an alcove at a party, she watched without being watched. She was a connoisseur of the tiny, telling detail. Like when Agnes mercilessly notices that her pupils’ crude, misogynist uncle ‘had found some means of compressing his waist into a remarkably small compass; and that, together with the unnatural stillness of his form, showed that the lofty-minded, manly Mr Robson, the scorner of the female sex, was not above the foppery of stays’.
Anne also wrote feelingly about the difficulties she faced. Charlotte said the Inghams were ‘desperate little dunces’, ‘unruly, violent … modern children’. Trying to keep order, Anne found herself doing things she really didn’t want to do. Agnes holds down one violent child, shakes another and pulls her hair. Sometimes, she has ‘to run after my pupils to catch them, to carry or drag them to the table, and often forcibly to hold them there till the lesson was done’. The spoiled Mary Ann Bloomfield
preferred rolling on the floor to any other amusement: down she would drop like a leaden weight; and when I, with great difficulty, had succeeded in rooting her thence, I had still to hold her up with one arm, while with the other I held the book from which she was to read or spell her lesson. As the dead weight of the big girl of six became too heavy for one arm to bear, I transferred it to the other: or, if both were weary of the burden, I carried her into a corner; and told her she might come out when she should find the use of her feet, and stand up: but she generally preferred lying there like a log till dinner or tea time … and would come crawling out, with a grin of triumph on her round, red face.
Mary Ann’s little sister Fanny spits in Agnes’s face. But worst of all is their brother Tom. When Agnes first arrives, Tom drags his rocking horse to the centre of the room, makes his sister hold the reins while he mounts it and makes Agnes watch ‘how manfully he use[s] his whip and spurs’. She hopes aloud he won’t use them on a real pony. ‘Oh, yes I will!’ he says, whipping harder. ‘I’ll cut into him like smoke!’ He hits his sister ‘to keep her in order’ and hits and kicks Agnes, and he’s strong, and it hurts.
In the nastiest scene in the book, Tom appears ‘running in high glee … with a brood of little callow nestlings in his hands’. He likes torturing birds. ‘Sometimes I give them to the cat; sometimes I cut them in pieces with my penknife; but the next, I mean to roast alive.’ Soon he is ‘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’. Sickened by his gloating, Agnes tries to persuade him not to torture the baby birds, but he won’t listen so she grabs a large stone and crushes them flat. It’s a mercy killing, and a brutal one. Agnes must have had to steel herself to do it. Anne too. Because this actually happened. When Gaskell asked Charlotte about it, Charlotte said ‘that none but those who had been in the position of a governess could ever realise the dark side of “respectable” human nature’.
Agnes realises Tom wants to ‘persecute the lower creation’ – not just birds and animals but girls and women. Mrs Bloomfield tells Agnes off for spoiling Tom’s pleasure, and Agnes retorts, ‘When Master Bloomfield’s amusements consist in injuring sentient creatures, I think it is my duty to interfere.’ Mrs Bloomfield thinks ‘the creatures were all created for our convenience’ and ‘a child’s amusement is scarcely to be weighed against the welfare of a soulless brute’. But Agnes doesn’t back down. She says Tom shouldn’t be encouraged to torture birds. He should learn mercy. It’s the most she has said since she arrived. She’s found her voice.
Anne had too. In connecting violence against women to violence against animals, Anne anticipated the work of activists like the unstoppable Irish campaigner Frances Power Cobbe, who in 1878 justified the shocking title of her essay ‘Wife-Torture in England’ by saying, ‘the familiar term “wife-beating” conveys as remote a notion of the extremity of the cruelty indicated as when candid and ingenuous vivisectors talk of “scratching a newt’s tail” when they refer to burning alive, or dissecting out the nerves of living dogs, or torturing ninety cats in the series of experiments’. Cobbe campaigned against both domestic violence and vivisection because she felt both were on a spectrum of male violence. If Anne had lived, maybe she would have joined her.
As it was, her incandescent anger at the Inghams is so palpable in Agnes Grey that some people think she haunts what remains of their house. Blake Hall was demolished in 1954 and its grand staircase, hand-carved from dark and fabulously burled yew, was sold. The opera singer Gladys Topping bought it for her house in Quogue, Long Island. She claimed that one evening in 1962, while meditating, she heard footsteps on the stairs and emerged to find a young woman in a full skirt, shawl, hair in a bun, holding a candlestick: Anne Brontë, straight out of central casting.
In December 1839, after eight months, Anne got fired for not being tough enough with the children. It must have been galling to fail. When Agnes is fired, she starts job-hunting at once, to ‘redeem my lost honour’ and because she is ‘not yet weary of adventure’. Anne did the same. While she had been away, Charlotte had taken a temporary post with a family called the Sidgwicks. From there, she wrote depressed letters to Nussey about ‘the long history of a private governess’s trials and crosses’ – although she only worked there for two and a half months. Charlotte also refused a second marriage proposal, from another curate. Meanwhile, Tabby moved out to live with her sister, feeling she wasn’t up to the housekeeping any more, so Emily took over, helped by their eleven-year-old servant Martha Brown. As for Branwell, he had been reading with Patrick, hoping to equip himself for teaching, and soon after Anne returned, he set off to be a tutor in the Lake District, stopping en route to drink until ‘the room spun round and the candles danced’, saying ‘farewell of old friend whisky’ before he knuckled down to work.
Anne was unemployed for four months. Perhaps, like Agnes, she resolved ‘to take things coolly’ next time; certainly, in her diary paper of 1841, she is pleased that she has ‘a little more self-possession’. As Agnes goes from her first job to her second, the tone shifts from hot rage to icy, scalpel-sharp wit. Agnes isn’t so ground down by what she is forced to do and witness; she is more able to laugh at the world and at herself. If Anne was already considering how she could write about her experience, she might have picked up a novel called The Governess, which had been published the year before. But she would not have recognised much of what was in it. Written by salonista Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington, The Governess is one of the ‘silver fork novels’, as the critic William Hazlitt derisively called them, all dandies and dilettantes, cads and coquettes, and lovingly detailed descriptions of achingly fashionable clothes. Blessington’s heroine Clara Mordaunt is a dazzling beauty forced into governessing after her father’s financial collapse and suicide. In a series of improbable adventures, she gets her fortune back and becomes a countess – just like her author! Blessington’s own rags-to-riches life, surviving a poverty-stricken childhood and an abusive first marriage, before she could marry an earl, write books, and be painted, oozing out of a silk dress, in a picture which Byron said ‘set all London raving’, must have given her a more expansive idea of what constituted realism. But no one who had been a governess could believe that at the end of the novel Clara’s ex-employers ever afterwards ‘treated the governesses … with more humanity; giving as a reason, that there was no knowing whether they might not, at some future period, become heiresses, or countesses’.
Maybe this made Anne think she could make people treat their governesses with more humanity, not by suddenly turning the governesses into countesses, but by showing employers how they had been inhumane. Agnes says her ‘design … [is] not to amuse, but to benefit those whom it might concern’ and that ‘if a parent has, therefrom, gained any useful hint, or an unfortunate governess received thereby the slightest benefit, I am well rewarded for my pains’. It did succeed with some readers. Lady Amberley, the suffragette and (incidentally) Bertrand Russell’s mother, wrote in her diary in 1868, that she had ‘read Agnes Grey … 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’.
Being a governess, and sharing stories with her sisters and friends about their working lives, raised Anne’s consciousness. She realised she had a story on her hands, a story no one was telling, an explosive story about what went on behind closed doors of houses up and down the country, a story that needed to be told. She wanted to write about employers like the Sidgwicks, who forced Charlotte to socialise, and then told her off for being shy. To be fair, Charlotte was probably not the best governess. She called her pupils ‘little devils incarnate’ and ‘riotous, perverse, unmanageable cubs’, and the Sidgwicks said she was always taking offence, or taking to her bed. But it is also true that one child threw a stone at her, and cut her forehead. And that when the same child later told Charlotte he loved her, Mrs Sidgwick jeered, ‘Love the governess, my dear!’
Anne wanted to write about how governesses were loaded up with work that had nothing to do with teaching. Charlotte had ‘to wipe the children’s smutty noses or tie their shoes or fetch their pinafores or set them a chair’, and was given ‘oceans of needlework, yards of cambric to hem, muslin nightcaps to make, and, above all things, dolls to dress’. Agnes has to wash and dress six-year-old Mary Ann, ‘no light matter’ because ‘her abundant hair was to be smeared with pomade, plaited in three long tails, and tied with bows of ribbon’ and because ‘at one time she would not be washed; at another she would not be dressed …; at another she would scream and run away’. At her second job, she has to do the boring bits of her pupil’s embroidery.
It can’t have escaped Anne that Branwell was having a much easier time of it. While Anne had to live in her employers’ homes (sometimes even sharing a room with her pupils), Branwell was in lodgings. He had privacy and time to do some serious walking and writing, and perhaps to have the odd fling; Juliet Barker has argued persuasively that while he was in the Lakes, he had an illegitimate child with a farm labourer’s daughter. Perhaps that’s why he was fired in June 1840.
Anne had no time for flings. Agnes is drily funny about how she was expected to be constantly on call:
I had, as it were, to keep my loins girded, my shoes on my feet, and my staff in my hand; for not to be immediately forthcoming when called for, was regarded as a grave and inexcusable offence: not only by my pupils and their mother, but by the very servant, who came in breathless haste to call me, exclaiming, ‘You’re to go to the schoolroom directly, mum, the young ladies is WAITING!!’ Climax of horror! actually waiting for their governess!!!
And she wasn’t even paid well. Charlotte would take a job in March 1841 for just £20 a year, of which £4 was deducted for laundry. The anonymous author of the teasingly titled 1856 book Hints to Governesses by One of Themselves claimed she was once offered just £6 a year. When Anne came to find her second job, she boldly decided not to go through a recommendation but to advertise, and to ask for double her previous salary. After all, thanks to Patrick, she could teach Latin and German as well as the accomplishments. On 8 May 1840, she set off for Thorp Green, near York, to work for the Robinsons, on £50 a year.
Thorp Green was seventy miles from home, ‘a formidable distance’, Agnes says, ten hours by gig, coach, coach again, railway and phaeton. Even now it takes a long time. When I go, Ann Dinsdale from the Parsonage meets me at York, having already taken a bus to Keighley and two trains. We take another train to Cattal and then a taxi for the last four miles. When I tell the driver why we’re there he asks, ‘Which Brontë? Emily or Charlotte?’ He hasn’t heard of Anne. ‘If it was a million-pound question on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? – name her three novels – I couldn’t do it.’ I reassure him. She only wrote two.
In the August heat, as we walk along Anne’s ‘quiet green lanes, and smiling hedges’, the wheat fields are gold, the hedgerows frill and foam with life, cow parsley froths along the verges, and field poppies catch the sun. It is softer and greener than Haworth, and not scoured by fierce winds – but Agnes finds it ‘depressingly flat’. The Robinsons’ house burned down in 1895, but it has been rebuilt as a school. It is hosting a summer camp, and as we wander around it, we hear singing, and cheering, and stamping feet. I tell Ann about my dreams about Anne, and we discuss whether we would like to be haunted by her or not.
At the Robinsons’, Anne’s pupils were older; the girls were twelve, thirteen and fourteen, and their brother was eight. In the novel, they are the Murrays, and Agnes mainly teaches sixteen-year-old Rosalie and fourteen-year-old Matilda. She insists that she is not exaggerating about their bad behaviour. ‘Had I seen it depicted in a novel, I should have thought it unnatural,’ she says, but ‘I saw it with my own eyes, and suffered from it too’. Rosalie is a man-stealer. Matilda is a tomboy. Both are cruel.
At first I wasn’t sure why Anne emphasised that unlike the nouveaux riches Bloomfields, the Murrays were ‘genuine thoroughbred gentry’, especially as in real life there wasn’t much difference in class between her two employers. Agnes is sure the Murrays will treat her with more respect. She’s something of a snob. But she changes. The Murrays turn out to be no better than the Bloomfields, Agnes learns that ‘genuine thoroughbred gentry’ treat their governesses as badly as anyone else – and Anne explodes the idea that class equals gentility. It was crucial to tackle this idea, because it was everywhere. It looms large in a review of Jane Eyre published in the Quarterly Review in 1848 which has become infamous. When I look it up, I wonder how terrible it can be.
It is worse than I could have imagined. The critic, Elizabeth Rigby, would become Lady Eastlake a year later and she writes very much from an employer’s point of view. She insists that Charlotte is wrong about Rochester’s friends. They can’t be ladies, or they would never treat Jane so badly. They talk ‘like parvenues’, she says, and ‘bully the servants in language no lady would dream of using’. For Rigby, the trouble is that governesses are supposed to be ladies who only have to work because of reduced circumstances. (They have to be ladies because otherwise how can they teach their pupils to be ladies?) But once a lady falls and becomes a governess, she isn’t a lady any more. But she is also not a servant. ‘I don’t trust them governesses,’ says a housekeeper in Vanity Fair. ‘They give themselves the hairs and hupstarts of ladies, and their wages is no better than you nor me.’ Rigby decides that, to avoid transgressing ‘that invisible but rigid line which alone establishes the distance between herself and her employers’, governesses must isolate themselves, refusing friendship with both their employers and the servants. By now I am quite irritated with Rigby, so I take a break and look her up. I find some calotypes of her taken by a pair of photographic pioneers in Edinburgh. She has chosen to do her hair in a style I can only describe as Princess Leia gone wrong. I am instantly pleased – even though I know I am being unkind.
Rigby comes unstuck when she tries to apply her theories to the latest report from a new charity called the Governesses’ Benevolent Institution. Set up in 1843, the institution’s aim was to advise governesses on investing their money wisely, and to give grants to the worst off. But they were so overwhelmed by requests for help that they realised they had to tell these women’s stories and push for change. They produced a devastating series of reports. About women who started governessing at sixteen and were still going in their sixties, and still hadn’t earned enough to save a penny. Women who lost their jobs when their pupils grew up, and found that, after a certain age, no one wanted to employ them. Women who supported their families for years, but found no one willing to return the favour. These worn-out women, often ill or disabled, ended up on the streets, in hospitals or in lunatic asylums. When Florence Nightingale took over the Institute for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in 1853, she noticed that most of her patients were governesses, because, heartbreakingly, ‘it is the cheapest lodging they can find’. Rigby’s response to these stories was churlish and inadequate – and still all about class. She lamented the lot of ‘these afflicted and destitute ladies, many of them with aristocratic names’, but blamed ‘fine-ladyism’ for their troubles; she said they must have been employed by middle-class women who didn’t know how to treat a governess. This kind of class bigotry meant critics just refused to believe Anne’s portraits of the upper classes behaving badly. Reviewing The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the Literary World ’s critic thundered, ‘can this sort of half-civilisation, half-brutification, be characteristic of English society …? Is it customary to find the combination of the boor and the bravo … in hereditary possession of long-descended estates …?’ Well, yes, Anne said, it was.
Charlotte was most upset by Rigby’s observation, ‘We need the imprudencies, extravagancies, mistakes, or crimes of a certain number of fathers, to sow that seed from which we reap the harvest of governesses.’ Patrick wasn’t imprudent, extravagant or a criminal. He was just poor, and that was why his daughters had to teach. Charlotte got her revenge in Shirley when she lifted chunks from Rigby’s review and put them, word for word, in the mouths of Mrs Pryor’s cruel and objectionable old employers. It’s very satisfying.
But a more effective argument against Rigby might have been just to send her a copy of Agnes Grey. Anne shows how even a governess who doesn’t want to cross Rigby’s ‘invisible but rigid line’ can still get caught in a quagmire of class uncertainty. Agnes complains that having to call her pupils Master and Miss undermines her authority, and about feeling ‘like one deaf and dumb who could neither speak nor be spoken to’. Even going for a walk is a trial:
As none of the … 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 … Thus … I gave myself no little trouble in my endeavour (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.
Anne found this humiliating and exhausting. But she also started to realise that her unease might be a gift to her as a writer.
Unease can be radical. It can be a hammer to crack society wide open and expose its taboos and mores. Anne realised that the problem was bad education. Agnes Grey is an antidote to the ubiquitous conduct books for girls; it shows how children go wrong. Tom Bloomfield will end up like his horrid uncle, a cruel fop – or like Huntingdon in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Rosalie Murray is taught to value wealth and status so she marries a rich man who will never make her happy, and looks set to pass on the misery to her own daughter. Anne shows how girls who are given nothing but polish, finish and dinner-party conversation are not prepared for life, taught to think for themselves, or warned about the perils of bad men. In real life, Anne tried to fight this, taking pride in teaching well, and teaching subjects girls didn’t usually study.
At Thorp Green, with access to the Robinsons’ books and the libraries of York and Scarborough, Anne also furthered her own education. Maybe that’s where she discovered Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, with its demand for state-funded co-education. Certainly, Wollstonecraft’s clarion call to ‘Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it’ reverberates through Agnes Grey. Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication messily, indignantly, in six short weeks during the French Revolution when everything seemed up for grabs. She couldn’t have imagined that, soon after she died, her ideals would be trodden in the dust, as governments everywhere clamped down on revolutionary ideas. Her sisters ended up living hand-to-mouth, going from one humiliating governess job to another, and as they got older and poorer, the idea of boys and girls being educated together, for free, must have seemed pure fantasy. Wollstonecraft’s dream wouldn’t come true until after the Second World War.
In the meantime, many governesses thought marriage might save them. Another novelist Anne probably discovered while at Thorp Green was Jane Austen. Charlotte famously hated Austen; ‘the Passions are perfectly unknown to her’, she said, and ‘she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy Sisterhood’. But Anne’s writing has often been compared to Austen’s. They both value reason and wit, balance satire with empathy, they both try to make their heroines happy. And in Agnes Grey, Anne both echoes and questions Emma.
In Austen’s novel, two governesses are saved by marriage. Jane Fairfax is saved before she even has to try the ‘slavery’ of governessing. But Miss Taylor has been Emma’s governess for sixteen years before she gets caught in drizzle one day, a man fetches an umbrella and soon they are walking down the aisle. Anne might have questioned Austen’s penchant for sending her heroines out into bad weather to find men – as Anne was forever getting bad colds, this might not have been her most effective strategy. I think she also felt there was more to Miss Taylor’s story than Austen was telling. She remixed it in Agnes Grey, signalling what she was doing by giving Agnes’s suitor the same name as Miss Taylor’s; they are both called Mr Weston.
Miss Taylor’s marriage is supposed to be true love, but is it really? Her pupil has outgrown her, and she must be wondering how long she will be kept on as a paid companion. Maybe she doesn’t want to uproot herself after sixteen years in one place. Maybe she knows, anyway, governesses have a shelf life, and she’ll find it hard to get another job. Maybe fear drives Miss Taylor into the drizzle, and maybe that’s why she lets herself be rescued. Marriage is her exit strategy. Anne was careful not to make it Agnes’s.
Agnes’s Weston is a gentle, overworked curate. He has just lost his mother, his rented rooms don’t feel like home and he has ‘nowt to live on’, but he still sends the poor widow Nancy Brown a sack of coals for her cold cottage. He is full of common sense, firm faith and unaffected sweetness. Oh, and he has a deep, clear voice, a lovely smile, and he preaches well. I have quite a soft spot for Weston myself. In a riff on Austen’s umbrella scene, Anne describes Rosalie and Agnes leaving church in heavy rain. They have begun a silent battle for Weston’s affections. Rosalie is a dog in the manger; she doesn’t want Weston, but she doesn’t want anyone else to have him either. As they leave church, she haughtily sets off for the carriage, under the footman’s umbrella, leaving Agnes to get drenched … and then Weston appears with an umbrella! Agnes is so flummoxed that she says no thank you, she doesn’t mind the rain. ‘I always lacked common sense when taken by surprise,’ comments the older Agnes, mouth twitching in amusement. Luckily, Weston walks Agnes to the carriage anyway, which puts ‘an unamiable cloud upon [Rosalie’s] pretty face’ – as if she has made the rain herself, and hoped it would soak her rival.
There’s no rain as Ann Dinsdale and I reach the church Anne was thinking of, in the village of Little Ouseburn. The sun is relentless, and it’s a relief to step into the church’s cool, dark interior. The Holy Trinity Church is small and solid. Most of it dates back to before the Normans, and some of it is built with stone salvaged from Roman ruins. Putting down my dusty rucksack, I sit at a pew, feeling safe and calm. This church is here to stay. It was Agnes’s happy place, ‘for at church I might look without fear of scorn or censure upon a form and face more pleasing to me than the most beautiful of God’s creations; I might listen without disturbance to a voice more charming than the sweetest music to my ears; I might seem to hold communion with that soul’. She does worry that by gazing at Weston, she is ‘mocking God with the service of a heart more bent upon the creature than the Creator’, but she comforts herself by reasoning that ‘it is not the man, it is his goodness that I love’, and that ‘We do well to worship God in His works’. I would like to show this passage to anyone who says Anne was tortured by self-denial. It’s the best justification for lusting after a curate I’ve ever read. And while she sat in this pew, Anne might have been lusting after her own curate, a real one, back in Haworth.
William Weightman was twenty-six, a clever, charming, classics-loving brewer’s son from Appleby. Anne had seen a lot of him in the four months she was unemployed. In fact, he went on a bit of a charm offensive, taking her and her sisters on such frivolous jaunts as a lecture in Keighley – at night! – and when he found out that none of them had ever had a valentine, he wrote them one each, posting them in secret from Bradford. They called him ‘Celia Amelia’ because he fancied a different girl each week, but was he interested in any of them? In January 1842, Charlotte told Nussey how Weightman ‘sits opposite to Anne at church sighing softly and looking out of the corners of his eyes to win her attention – and Anne is so quiet, her look so downcast – they are a picture’. Charlotte seems to have been quite taken by him herself. She wrote about him incessantly, and painted his portrait – surely a ploy to gaze at him with impunity. She was always linking him with other women – a classic deflection technique – and when Nussey asked if she was falling for him, Charlotte protested too much: ‘Let me have no more of your humbug about Cupid, etc … it is all groundless trash.’ Perhaps Weightman spurned her because later she called him ‘a thorough male-flirt’.
It’s typical of reserved Anne that the first poem she (probably) wrote about Weightman isn’t about being in love but about how to hide it. In ‘Self-Congratulation’, which she wrote in January 1840, she remembers sitting around a fire, ‘conversing merrily’. When she hears a man approach, she forces herself not to tremble or blush, even though her spirit burns and her heart beats ‘full and fast!’ And she confesses to ‘aching anguish’ and ‘bitter burning woe’. I think Anne liked and wanted Weightman, but she could also see he was an incorrigible charmer; and perhaps, before giving him her heart, she wanted to see if he’d grow up.
He didn’t get the chance. In September 1842, he caught cholera while out visiting the sick and died, at just twenty-eight. A few weeks later Anne bravely wrote a poem that begins ‘I will not mourn thee, lovely one’, comparing the man she is (not) mourning to the morning sun because his life was ‘full as bright’ and calling him ‘hopeful and beloved’. Maybe Weightman’s hopefulness was what Anne liked most. And maybe her raw passion, as she describes the ‘darling’ with an ‘angel smile’ and even ‘the pleasures’ that are now buried in his tomb, explains why neither she nor Charlotte released the poem. Anne couldn’t go home for Weightman’s funeral, where Patrick said, through his tears, ‘we were always like father and son’, and was so upset that instead of giving his sermon without notes, as usual, he read it out. Weightman’s memorial tablet still has pride of place at the church in Haworth, and it praises him for orthodox principles, active zeal, moral habits, learning, mildness and, endearingly, for affability.
Staring up at the pulpit in Little Ouseburn, I feel desperately sad for Anne. If only she had married a man who was affable! I am overwhelmed by how much death there is in Anne’s story. She was twenty-two when Weightman died. He hadn’t made it to his thirtieth birthday. Nor would she. Her mother hadn’t made it to her fortieth.
I feel suddenly glad that I have just celebrated my fortieth in a room above a London pub, with salted caramel cake, and fizz, and dancing to A-ha in a sparkly dress, and people I love; suddenly glad I marked it and I feel glad to be alive and hitting the (maybe) midpoint of my life, because not everyone gets this far.
What would have happened if Weightman had lived? Anne did want love, wishing, in ‘Self-Communion’ for
One look that bids our fears depart,
And well assures the trusting heart
It beats not in the world alone –
But if she had become Mrs Weightman, she might not have become Acton Bell. And, having lost her love, she memorialised him on the pages of her novel, giving Weston his kindness, but making him sober and steady too.
Weston was also a perfectly plausible suitor for Agnes – exactly the kind of man Anne could have married, the kind of man Charlotte did marry. Anne works hard to make us believe that Weston is The One. He must be good because he cares so much about animals. When Agnes’s pupil Matilda gleefully lets her dog savage a baby hare, Weston comforts Agnes with bluebells, which he’s remembered she likes, and, she says, ‘it was something to find my unimportant saying so well remembered: it was something that he had noticed so accurately the time I had ceased to be visible’. She finally feels seen. Weston also saves a cat, which is such a reliable writer’s trick for making a character likeable that the screenwriting guru Blake Snyder wrote a whole book about it in 2005, called Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting That You’ll Ever Need (it has two sequels). While villains might boil bunnies, heroes should save cats (like Sigourney Weaver in Alien) or pet dogs, or give bread to a starving child like Disney’s Aladdin. Weston, however, does save a cat, rescuing Nancy Brown’s cat from the Murrays’ gamekeeper. And Snyder is right; it does make me root for him. Even more when, at the end of the novel, he saves a dog.
Not just any dog. Snap is a puppy Matilda can’t be bothered to look after, so Agnes steps in, and Snap becomes her ‘companion, the only thing I had to love me’, another fictional avatar of Flossy, the dog the Robinsons gave Anne. In the novel, the Murrays cruelly take Snap from Agnes and give him to a rat-catcher who is ‘notorious for his brutal treatment of his canine slaves’. And then one morning, Agnes is walking alone on Scarborough Sands and there he is, ‘frisking and wriggling’ with joy. She kisses Snap again and again before noticing who’s with him. Weston has rescued him. And now he wants to rescue her. Or does he? The thing is, by the end of Agnes Grey, Agnes doesn’t need rescuing.
I only realise how innovative this is when I go back to Jane Eyre. It’s strange reading Charlotte’s novel after Agnes Grey. I can see how it must have surprised Anne when she read it as a work in progress. Given how much Charlotte hated governessing, Anne probably expected her to tackle the subject with ruthless realism. After all, she had already eviscerated her old school. But instead, Charlotte gave Jane a foxy boss, a kind housekeeper and just one charming pupil. And a romance. Governesses who fell for their employers took a huge risk. T. E. Lawrence’s mother Sarah was a governess who got pregnant by her boss, an Irish baronet, in 1885. He ran away with her but had to cut ties with his old family (including, wrenchingly, his four daughters). He and Sarah couldn’t marry, and despite using false names, they never quite escaped the stigma of illegitimacy. And this was almost a best-case scenario for a governess who had an affair with her boss. What was vanishingly unlikely was Jane’s story of becoming Rochester’s equal and wife and mistress of his house.
If Jane’s story is the fairy tale, the nightmare appears in a book called Miss Weeton: Journal of a Governess. It was only published after a local historian made a startling find in a Wigan junk shop in 1925: a dusty book of letters and some fragments of memoir by a Lancashire woman called Nelly Weeton who tried to escape governessing by marrying, in 1814, when she was thirty-seven. But marriage did not save her. In bleak staccato she describes how she was
Repeatedly turned out destitute; twice imprisoned … having myself been beaten almost to death; several times obliged to flee for my life … turned out only for complaining … I was threatened with being sent to a Lunatic Asylum, only for asking for food. Cloaths I could not procure until I got them on credit … With my bruises thick upon me … was I imprisoned for two days … now expecting nightly or daily to be murdered – or, worse, sent to a Lunatic Asylum in my right mind; for so I was threatened … I expected to be … driven out destitute … so that I kept myself locked up day and night in my bedroom, going out only by stealth in the evening, to fetch provisions … On returning one night, I found my room on fire, and my bed burnt!
She left, but her husband took their child. There is little light in Weeton’s story. The saddest thing is that she needn’t have married at all and only did it because she was desperate to get out of governessing, after one job where her employer was a drunk, violent bully, and her first pupil fell into a fire and died, and another job where she felt ‘totally excluded from all rational society’. When she agreed to get married, after knowing her husband for a shockingly short time, she had just saved enough money to be thinking seriously about starting her own dairy farm. I wish she had.
I also wish Agnes didn’t give up work at the end of Agnes Grey. I like Weston. I really do. But I don’t want Agnes to lose her independence, or her income. Even Jane resists Rochester when he orders her, on their engagement, to ‘give up [her] governessing slavery at once’. But when they do marry, she stops teaching Adèle and sends her to school, even though she knows the horrors of schools. Adèle’s first school is ‘too strict … too severe’ and makes her pale, thin and unhappy. How does Jane know the next school will be any better?
Charlotte’s friend Mary Taylor gave her a hard time about her attitude to working women. She would give her an even harder time when she read Shirley, in which Caroline only wants to work because she feels so bored and aimless. When Shirley worries that work can ‘make women masculine, coarse, unwomanly’, Caroline’s response is far from robust:
And what does it signify whether unmarried and never-to-be-married women are unattractive and inelegant or not? … The utmost which ought to be required of old maids, in the way of appearance, is that they should not absolutely offend men’s eyes.
Who cares if women offend men’s eyes? Why doesn’t Caroline defend work as a way for women to attain self-respect and earn money? Taylor hated the way Charlotte presented work as something women could ‘indulge in – if they give up marriage and don’t make themselves too disagreeable to the other sex’. She called Charlotte ‘a coward and a traitor’, and took up the pen herself, to write a book called The First Duty of Women, about how women should earn money. At seventy-three, she wrote her first novel, Miss Miles, which asks, ‘Are righteous means of helping themselves never to be found for women?’ In her novel, the idle rich fall apart when hard times hit Yorkshire, while working women thrive.
By the time Weston proposes, Agnes has become one of the resourceful, fulfilled working women Taylor rewards with happy endings in Miss Miles. Agnes has been dissatisfied and exploited, but she has turned her working life around. She has learned how to get work, how to hang on to it, how to get paid better for it, how to draw boundaries, how to retain her dignity and her self-esteem, how to manage difficult employers, how to find meaning in her work, and even pleasure – once she leaves the Murrays to work with her mother.
Alice Grey is an enterprising woman with a refreshing view of things. She doesn’t worry about marrying off her daughters, saying breezily, ‘it’s no matter whether they get married or not: we can devise a thousand honest ways of making a livelihood’. When she is left a widow, she decides to go to work too. She doesn’t have to. Her daughter Mary offers to take her in, and her long-lost father writes to say that if she’ll admit she was wrong to disobey him by marrying a poor clergyman, he will ‘make a lady’ of her again, and remember Mary and Agnes in his will. It’s a way out of poverty, and a guarantee of a future for her daughters. But Mrs Grey refuses.
Instead, she resolves to ‘gather honey’ for herself. It’s a lovely phrase, making work sound both productive and sweet, and beehives are, of course, ruled by queens. Alice and Agnes set up a school, and Agnes finds there is ‘a considerable difference between working with my mother in a school of our own, and working as a hireling among strangers, despised and trampled upon by old and young’. A school of our own has a pleasing Woolfian resonance for twenty-first-century feminists. It was also Anne’s dream.
Anne and her sisters had first thought of following the example of the Woolers from Roe Head and setting up their own school in the summer of 1841. Maybe Anne thought about the school Mary Wollstonecraft had set up with her sisters, on feminist principles. Even Emily daydreamed about the three of them being ‘merrily seated in our own sitting-room in some pleasant and flourishing seminary’. When their aunt offered them a loan of £100, and Margaret Wooler offered them her school, it seemed a genuine possibility. But Charlotte scuppered it. She had become consumed by a ‘wish for wings’. She longed to travel. So she came up with a new plan: she and Emily would go to Brussels for six months, to improve their French. She told her aunt they would only need £50 to set up the school, and the other £50 would cover their trip. But secretly she rejected Wooler’s offer, and told Emily that she planned to stay longer in Brussels. It is not clear how much finagling Charlotte did. But it seems unfair that she chose Emily to come with her, when Anne was better both at teaching and at leaving home. Charlotte said fuzzily, ‘Anne might take her turn at some future period, if our school answered,’ and admitted that ‘Anne seems omitted in the present plan’ (using the passive as if it is not her fault), ‘but if all goes right I trust she will derive her full share of benefit from it in the end’. She added, vague and fervent, ‘I exhort all to hope. I believe in my heart that this is acting for the best; my only fear is that others should doubt and be dismayed.’ I am sure Anne did doubt it was for the best, and that she was dismayed. She even thought about resigning her job and taking over the Parsonage housekeeping, but the Robinsons pleaded with her to stay, so in the end Tabby returned to the Parsonage, and Anne stayed where she was.
The school never did get off the ground. Charlotte and Emily spent ten months in Brussels, and then Charlotte went back for another year, teaching, on a paltry salary of £16. When, finally, in the summer of 1844, she was ready to start the school, she ignored Anne’s suggestion to put it in Scarborough, and instead planned to squeeze their pupils into the remote, cramped Parsonage. No wonder no one replied to the adverts she printed for ‘The Misses’ Brontë’s Establishment for the Board and Education of a limited number of Young Ladies’. That autumn, they gave up the school idea for good.
Until Anne made it true on the page. Agnes’s school is in Scarborough, in a large respectable house, on a broad white road, with a narrow slip of garden out front, and a flight of steps to a trim, brass-handled door. Agnes often takes the pupils for walks by the sea, her ‘delight’. And although Agnes leaves to marry Weston, Agnes Grey does end with one working woman happy, independent, and resolutely at her post; Mrs Grey goes on gathering honey and the school lives on. Her story shows that you can marry happily, and things can still go wrong. Your husband can lose all your savings on an unwise investment. You can lose your husband. And instead of hoping to be rescued (because Mrs Grey’s father offers her exactly that, a fantasy of rescue), you can rescue yourself. If you are brave enough and resourceful enough. Because in Agnes Grey work isn’t just a distraction for bored women, it’s the key to independence. And it’s reassuring to know that if Agnes ever wants or needs to earn her own living again, she won’t be daunted.