In many if not most households this figure was less than the salary of the housekeeper or a lady’s maid, and perhaps even less than the cook’s. While room and board obviously were included, most governesses were responsible for their own laundry, as well as travel “home” once or twice a year and their clothing; few could have had left more than £20 a year to save or to spend on anything else. This, of course, Anne Brontë knew from her own service. From what she depicts in the novel, she was well aware of the different ways in which a family could make a governess feel ill at ease, and while a governess might achieve a limited independence by supporting herself (barely), few could save or send money home; the only substantive financial benefit to her family would be to remove herself from being a financial burden.

Yet, the worst aspects of the governess’s situation were not financial but social. As critic Katharine West wrote in Chapter of Governesses: A Study of the Governess in English Fiction, 1800-1949

(1949):

... the core of the problem of a governess’s happiness or the reverse [was] that she was thwarted of her natural woman’s life. The fonder a girl was of children, the more she must long for children of her own. The more she wished to be mistress of a house with her own things in it, the more she was oppressed by the splendour of other people’s possessions. The more she loved society, the more lonely she felt. The fonder she let herself grow of charges and their parents, the more she hated leaving them. The greater her love for books and music, the more her girls’ stupidity or coarseness galled her (pp. 84-85).

And, finally, the most telling problem of all: Governesses were unlikely to marry.

This, then, is where we can begin to understand Anne’s novel: Governesses occupied a social position that was both intensely marginal (in their own families, in society at large) and intensely central (in that they were concerned with the care of children). We see this from the start of Agnes Grey’s career. She begins in the center of her loving (if economically unstable) middle-class family, the beloved younger child of loving parents. Once she leaves to take up her first position with the Bloomfields, she is cast adrift in a family that hardly seems to be aware of her existence, except to plague and abuse her. On the evening of her arrival, she is greeted with excessive formality by Mrs. Bloomfield and served a tough, cold dinner that seems but a symbolic foretaste of her service in general. Mrs. Bloomfield is “cold, grave, and forbidding” (p. 21), far from the warm, motherly presence Agnes has in her naivete envisioned; the servants ignore her as if she were an inferior member of the staff (as in truth she is); and Mr. Bloomfield is as ill-tempered and abrupt with her as he is with his own wife. Time does not lead to any improvement, and Agnes’s pain is deepened when she is summarily dismissed.

The Murrays are a family somewhat less “dysfunctional” (to use contemporary jargon), and with them Agnes is not as completely excluded from family life, but the children are no less in need of discipline and direction. The elder daughter, Rosalie, is ignorant, self-centered, and vain; the next, Matilda, is a thorough “hoyden” (p. 56), or tomboy, interested only in horses and hunting, who “had learnt to swear like a trooper” (p. 65) to boot. Even more serious is that the two lack any moral sense whatsoever. Though Agnes sees their faults, she has learned from her first post that a governess who criticizes her charges to their mother (in this novel fathers take no interest in their children’s education) will find herself out of a job posthaste.

Here, then, we have a hint of what Anne Brontë sees with clear and unerring vision as a gaping void at the center of middle-class family life. Children, she suggests, receive from their parents unconditional love, but beyond that they require moral training, exercise in self-discipline, and a genuine education (not rote learning). Yet none of the mothers and fathers we see are fit to provide this genuine education. The former indulge one kind of moral laxness (vanity, lethargy), the latter another (thoughtless violence, selfishness).