Robinson and she with him; whether her conduct was in any way at fault remains a mystery. Whatever may or may not have happened between them, he was turned out of the house, and Anne resigned her post. From this time on, she remained at Haworth with Emily and Charlotte, the three watching helplessly as Branwell began his decline into alcoholism and total lethargy.

She must already have commenced writing Agnes Grey. She had been writing poetry for many years, at first in connection with the Gondal saga, later (like Emily) more personal lyrics. When Charlotte discovered that her sisters were writing verse in the autumn of 1845, the project was born to publish a joint volume by all three; Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, respectively, as they styled themselves pseudonymously) appeared in May 1846, though it was spectacularly unsuccessful in sales. By this time Agnes Grey was completed, and the sisters were approaching several publishers serially about three unconnected works of fiction: Agnes Grey, Emily’s Wuthering Heights, and Charlotte’s The Professor. T. C. Newby accepted Emily’s and Anne’s manuscripts, publishing them together as one three-volume work (Anne’s novel was the third volume) in December 1847.1 Charlotte’s rejection by Newby turned out to be fortunate, as her “governess” novel, Jane Eyre, had already been published by the more prestigious firm Smith, Elder two months earlier.

Coming, as it did, at the tail end of Wuthering Heights, Anne’s quiet, spare novel was barely noticed by the critics. Both her sisters’ novels were far more sensational in their choices of subject, and reviewers (many of them hostile) focused mainly on their work. Endless speculation followed about the identity of the Bells: Were they male or female, and were they three or only one? Anne, however, perhaps the most determined to be a professional writer of them all, by now already had made good progress on her new novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, with its thoroughly sensational subject. This time, Anne’s work attracted attention in its own right, though much of it (predictably) was unfavorable on moral grounds.

Newby was inherently unreliable, if not an out-and-out scoundrel, and for his own purposes he actively promoted confusion about the identity of the author of The Tenant in June 1848, suggesting it was the suddenly famous Currer Bell. George Smith (of Smith, Elder) wrote to the Bells/Brontës that he suspected Currer/Charlotte was playing tricks with him, and so in July, to reassure him, Anne and Charlotte paid him a surprise visit in London. In person they hoped to persuade him that they were indeed two writers and not one; to his credit, Smith responded graciously and generously. This was Anne’s only visit to the metropolis.

Soon after, by early winter, Emily and Anne both were quite ill; Emily refused medical attention (not that any then available would have prolonged her life) and died in December. Then, in January 1849, Anne was given the death sentence—consumption—and from that point on she knew her time left was brief. She rallied just enough in May to make a journey with Charlotte and their closest friend, Ellen Nussey, to Scarborough, where she had spent summer holidays with the Robinsons. There she died on May 28.

 

This outline of Anne Brontë’s life is relevant to our reading of Agnes Grey for many reasons, especially because Anne’s own experience as a governess seems to have developed into the subject matter of the novel. From the time of her death—in truth even before—readers have wanted to treat the novel as if it were unvarnished and unmediated autobiography. Her biographers and critics alike have read the novel to explicate the life and have used the life to explicate the novel—a tautological circle that may be interesting but is hardly productive, for the available details of Anne’s working life between 1840 and 1845 are sketchy and almost certainly now never will be further illuminated. What we now know is what we are likely ever to know. More to the point, the biographical dimension to the novel in fact is a serious distraction. Agnes Grey portrays the awkward and at times painful situation of the governess—how could it not, given Anne’s life and work—but it goes far beyond mere reportage.

Not that the reportage is unimportant: We look to the Victorian novel (as did so many of its contemporary readers) in part to learn vicariously about the lived experience of people in diverse and interesting circumstances far from our own. And it seems that in the 1840s Victorian readers were interested greatly in the secret lives of governesses. Indeed, governesses were much in the news in the 1840s, with articles in the periodical press, novels devoted to their plight, and the signal event of the foundation of the Governesses Benevolent Institution in 1843 (for no Victorian social problem was really a legitimate problem until a national charitable institution had arisen to solve it). Governesses feature as characters in many novels of the decade, ranging from sweet and noble Ruth Pinch in Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit to scheming and seductive Becky Sharp in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. We have fictional governesses who are pathetic, incompetent, and passionate. Given all this attention, we remind ourselves that governesses probably numbered some 25,000 at midcentury, but it was not their relatively small numbers that was at issue so much as the almost unimaginable anomaly of their situation.

At a time when a gentleman was defined as a person of no fixed occupation, and when no respectable middle-class woman was ever employed outside the home, the position of the governess was, in class and social terms, a virtual oxy-moron, almost an impossibility. For if, in fact, the governess was a respectable gentlewoman (as she must be if she were to care for one’s children), then she could not be an employee; but since she was working for her own living, she must be an employee and thus could not be a gentlewoman. This was a veritable conundrum.

Thus, how to treat the governess was a constant source of perplexity for the writers of domestic manuals, no doubt reflecting the lived anxiety and confusion of many middle- and upper-class households. Rising prosperity, of course, meant that more families were able to afford governesses but as yet lacked experience in dealing with them, perhaps not knowing even the prevailing wages. For while governesses typically were from good families—proverbially down on their luck either because the father had died or lost his fortune in speculation—their wages classed them with servants. Salaries ranged typically from £15 to £50 a year (though in a very few genteel and elegant establishments perhaps as much as £150).