Agnes Grey (2 page)

Back home, Anne’s literary career was initiated by Charlotte’s enthusiastic discovery of Emily’s Gondal poems. The sisters each agreed to contribute poems to a collection for publication. Under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, respectively), the Brontës published the collection in 1846 at their own expense, to positive criticism but dismal sales. Undaunted, the sisters turned their attentions to novel writing, each bringing a unique and highly inventive style to the effort. In 1847 Anne’s labors produced
Agnes Grey,
published jointly with Emily’s
Wuthering
Heights in December of that year by Thomas Cautley Newby. Charlotte’s
Jane Eyre
had been published two months earlier by a more prestigious house, Smith, Elder and Co., to great success, overshadowing her sisters’ novels and surpassing them in acclaim. Less sensational in its subject matter than either
Jane Eyre
or
Wuthering Heights,
Anne’s
Agnes Grey
received relatively little attention. Nonetheless, Anne began work immediately on her second novel,
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
(published by Newby in 1848), which was a commercial and critical success. The novel’s frank depictions of alcoholism and violence shocked readers but fueled its popularity. Wild speculation about its mysterious authorship prompted Charlotte and Anne to disclose to their publishers their true identities.

In September 1848, Branwell Brontë died, his body destroyed by illness and alcohol. In December, Emily Brontë died of tuberculosis, following a rapid decline. Anne herself became ill with influenza, then tuberculosis. Though weak and frail, she determined to travel once more to her beloved Scarborough, ostensibly for the curative powers of the sea air. The trip proved her last; Anne Brontë died on May 28, 1849, and was buried in Scarborough.

The World of Anne Brontë and
Agnes Grey

It is impossible for any of us to approach the Brontës without calling up the Brontë myth. We are all familiar with its outlines. The isolated family house on the edge of a bleak Yorkshire moor. The four young children, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne, their mother and elder sisters all dead, now in the care of a stern Calvinist aunt. The Reverend Patrick Brontë, a failed writer himself, reclusive, brooding, and subject to periods of dark rage. Then, through the agency of a present of toy soldiers, the children begin writing sagas in which the soldiers come to life. All four are gifted, though Branwell drinks himself to an early death, while the three young women precociously develop writing careers—Emily dying young of the family curse of tuberculosis, and Charlotte living longer, only to die shortly after her marriage. Anne, the youngest, is also the quietest and least talented; modest, religious, and industrious, she too dies of TB at an early age.

The narrative, like any myth, partakes of some truths but embodies a great deal of fantasy—and a great deal of that linked to the famous Wyler-Olivier-Oberon film of
Wuthering
Heights (1939). To begin: The parsonage was at the edge of a large, bustling mill town; the aunt appears to have been loving and kind and an evangelical Methodist, a far cry from Calvinism; Patrick Brontë was actively engaged in the affairs of the parish and the community, and clearly much concerned with the education and welfare of his children; and so on. But the myth is probably most unfair in its relegation of Anne Brontë to a bit player in the family drama—in fact, she was, though the youngest, probably the most precocious of them all as a writer, producing two novels and a substantial body of poems by the time she died at twenty-nine.

Anne’s relegation to a minor role within the family happened not long after her death. Her second novel,
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall—
the story of a wife who abandons her husband to live under an assumed name and who commits the even greater moral crime of falling in love with another man while her husband lives—was nothing short of scandalous in its subject matter. By contemporary standards, no young woman could write about immoral acts without either knowing of them firsthand or by being tainted by having imagined them—in either case, her reputation was tarnished beyond repair. After Anne died, Charlotte tried to defend her sister against charges of moral impropriety by controlling the public representation of Anne’s character (and, similarly, that of Emily, whose reputation suffered from her authorship of
Wuthering Heights),
and it was she who began constructing the image of a quiet, passive, deeply religious (and by implication not as talented) Anne. Deeply religious she was, but far from quiet and passive—
and
she was very talented.

A useful starting point will be the facts of her life, which shed some considerable light on her character and her interests. The circumstances of the family are somewhat exceptional: Anne’s father was very much a self-made man, even making of his humble Irish surname (Prunty or Brunty) the rather more impressive, aristocratic, and vaguely French-sounding Brontë. The son of a farmer, and at first a blacksmith’s assistant, he was by age seventeen a village schoolmaster, but in 1802 his prospects changed dramatically when he managed to secure a scholarship to St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he prepared for a clerical career. He rose through the ranks of the church, acquiring along the way, in 1812, a respectable and mature wife, Maria Branwell. By 1820 they were settled in Haworth, where Reverend Brontë was perpetual curate (that is, he held the office for life) of a large, populous parish. Anne, the sixth and last child, was born on January 17, 1820, three months before the move to Haworth.