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”. This brutal mercy killing is almost too violent to read. Agnes Grey is brilliant on the horror of a first job: she is wrongfooted, overworked, underpaid and out of her depth She grabs a large flat stone and crushes the birds flat. 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. One day his vile uncle, who encourages Tom’s cruelty, gives him a nest of baby birds. One of Agnes’s pupils, Tom Bloomfield, enjoys torturing birds.

But instead of an adventure, Agnes gets a crash course in how cruel the world can be, and how it got that way. She arrives at her first job, with the Bloomfield family (in real life, they were the Inghams), feeling a “rebellious flutter” of excitement. Her family scoff that she’s much too young, but she persuades them. Agnes turns to one of the only other jobs open to middle-class women: she decides to become a governess. Mary goes for the most genteel work she can find: she starts selling her watercolours. Then they start working out how they might make more money. Agnes’s capable, enterprising mother Alice slashes their expenses. 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. She always chafed at being patronised.Īnne grew up poor.

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. Agnes has lost even more siblings she and her older sister Mary are the only two who have “survived the perils of infancy”.

Anne lost her two eldest sisters when she was five. Both Anne and Agnes were originally one of six children. rugged hills”, so when I read the novel, I imagine the Yorkshire moors. Anne doesn’t specify where Agnes grows up, but she does say she was “born and nurtured among. The eponymous heroine is a clergyman’s daughter, just as Anne’s father, Patrick Brontë, was the perpetual curate of Haworth in Yorkshire. Agnes Grey sticks close to the facts of Anne’s life.

Jane eyre agnes grey