Reading Agnes Grey

Reading Agnes Grey
Anne Bronte


Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte is the novel that I read back through Kansas.

Anne used her experience as a governess to write the novel. She tackles many social issues in her book. And although I found this interesting because it exposed a lot of how a true Victorian family lived, I liked her other book, The Tenant of Windefell Hall better.

First, Anne exposes the "fragility and the hypocrisy of the Victorian family." "Anne Bronte sees with clear vision a gaping void in the center of middle class family life." She shows us how Children receive from their parents unconditional love, but beyond that they require no moral training, They have little self -discipline, and they require a genuine education (not just rote learning). Yet the problem arose because none of the mothers and fathers were fit to provide them of this genuine education.

In the two families that she describes in the novel, one set of parents only provides vanity and lethargy and the other family provides thoughtless violence and selfishness. Neither parent in either family is capable of serving as a model of anything except what is to be avoided at all cost. So you see that Girls are trained to grow into witless ornaments and boys into heartless brutes. "Thus Anne shows us in a series of facing mirrors each generation molding its successor in it their own degraded image."

Secondly, Anne also shows how governess were treated at this time. For men of noble birth, who had money with a birth title but had no job title, this was considered the best way of life and respectable. Men that worked for their money (such as second sons or middle class) it wasn't looked as the best of circumstances and not truly favorable. Since it wasn't proper or respectable for men--- it definitely wasn't for women. So any highly educated woman that had not been provided for by her family due to losing money or things being entailed away, had little choice if they were not engaged but to looked for a governess situation. Society did not know what to do with these women. They didn't know how to pay them and they didn't know how to treat them. So it ended up being that they were treated poorly and paid little. Although in most cases the highly educated lady was above her employers rank by birth and had a better education, her employers and their servants would treat them as the lowest servant.

Third, Anne shows how Victorian romances were truly like. There were few opportunities to meet and even fewer where they might be alone for more than a minute. Yet with this limited scope for interaction it made it difficult to get to know someone, if not almost impossible. So it was most important, then that they learn as much as possible from the chances they they had. You had to carefully scrutinize the other and learn enough to make the right judgement, given the few moments that you had with each other. Divorces was not legal, and women were considered property, so a young teenage woman she would also rely on her parents judgement and discernment. The problem would arise if her parents were more concern with establishing a higher social status for their daughter than being concern about protecting their daughters. If this was the case "approval" from the family would not have been given since LOVE was not looked upon as important.

My own opinion: The scripture in Ecclesiastes 1:9 comes to mind, "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." Victorian pictures and films show the grand aspect of the higher class that we in this age so admire about that time period. Unfortunately, if you study carefully , we see that their social issues in their time period is no different than our own. They have the same problems that have been passed on from generation. So why do we admire it?

In spite of all these heavy social situations, the book is a very light read when you compare Anne's writing to her sisters. Some say she is an inferior writer to them. However, I disagree. I think she is delightful. She can touch on the same social issues that her sisters did with out having you to read dark themes and three times as many words to get the same idea across.