Really more of a novella than a novel, and with an ending that was fairly contrived and too hasty, it nevertheless captured the struggle and the romance that epitomise the tremendous heights of storytelling that Anne and Charlotte Brontë attained. Thoroughly intelligent and an exercise in humility for the reader, Anne here matches Charlotte’s prodigious vocabulary.
During much of the book, Agnes came across as a constant whiner, especially considering the fact that, 170 years later, the nature of employment is still as petty and circumscribed as what she describes. I have wondered if the protagonist’s name is a play on agnus dei, “the lamb of god who takes away the sins of the world”, and I think there is good reason for such a supposition: Agnes is certainly the victim and whipping girl of the iniquity of her host families. As scholars have noted, this work is a political and social statement about the treatment of servants, and governesses in particular, at the time of its writing.
I think that I haven’t cried whilst reading since 2001, and the passage where Mrs Grey explains her grief at the passing of her husband and friend, moved me thus. “He is mistaken in supposing that I can regret… the thirty years I have passed in the company of my best and dearest friend… but I was made for him, and he for me; and I can no more repent the hours, days, years of happiness we have spent together, and which neither could have had without the other, than I can the privilege of having been his nurse in sickness, and his comfort in affliction.” I don’t know how the Brontës came to such a profound understanding of love’s bonds, but their expression of it – in several of their novels – is poetical beauty exemplified, and a triumph of the written word.