Agnes Grey Study Guide

Anne Brontë was born in northern England in 1820, the youngest daughter of Irish-born clergyman Patrick Brontë and his wife Maria Brontë née Branwell. She had five older siblings: Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Patrick Branwell, and Emily. In 1821, Brontë’s mother Maria died, and her aunt Elizabeth Branwell moved in with the family to raise the children. In 1825, Brontë’s oldest sisters Maria and Elizabeth died of tuberculosis. Brontë was largely homeschooled, though as a teenager she attended Roe Head, a girls’ school where her older sister Charlotte had been a pupil and subsequently a teacher. In 1839, at age 19, she worked as a governess for the Ingham family, whose poorly behaved children she was not allowed to discipline. The Inghams nevertheless blamed Brontë for their children’s failure to improve and fired her. In 1840, Brontë began working as a governess for the Robinson family at Thorpe Green Hall; they employed her until 1846, when she gave notice. Also in 1846, Brontë and her sisters Charlotte and Emily published a jointly authored poetry collection under male pseudonyms, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Though almost no one bought the collection, Brontë later published her poetry in various literary magazines under the same pseudonym, Acton Bell. In 1847, Brontë’s first novel Agnes Grey, a semi-autobiographical representation of Brontë’s career as a governess, was published. In 1848, Brontë published her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Also in 1848, Brontë’s brother Patrick Branwell and her sister Emily died, likely of tuberculosis. Brontë died of tuberculosis the next year, 1849, at age 29.

Agnes Grey takes place in rural, northern England during the first half of the 1800s. In the early 1800s, most English schools were religiously affiliated and many poor English children had no access to education at all. In 1833, the UK’s Parliament voted to begin national funding of schools for poor children. Yet upper-middle and upper-class parents tended to send their older sons to private schools and to arrange private, live-in female tutors for their younger children and daughters. These private, live-in female tutors were called governesses. Governesses occupied a peculiar space in Victorian culture because they tended to be unmarried, educated women who worked to support themselves, which was unusual for middle-class women at the time. As such, they came from the same social class—or at least a similar social class—to the families that employed them, but they were not considered that family’s social equals. This dynamic is evident throughout Agnes Grey. The families that employ Agnes as a governess expect her to model appropriate behavior, manners, morals, and knowledge to their children, expectations betraying that they recognize Agnes as coming from a similar social class to theirs. And yet these same families treat Agnes as a social inferior, forbidding her from disciplining their children and failing to acknowledge her in social situations.

In Anne Brontë’s first novel Agnes Grey, Agnes’s flirtatious teenaged pupil Rosalie Murray marries Sir Thomas Ashby, an aristocrat with a bad reputation, for his title and money. Rosalie ends up miserable, learning after the wedding that Sir Ashby is frequently drunk and prone to infidelity. Anne Brontë’s second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), similarly represents a young woman’s unhappy marriage to an unfaithful, alcoholic aristocrat, Arthur Huntington. These representations may have influenced George Eliot’s late novel Daniel Deronda (1876), in which flirtatious young Gwendolen Harleth makes a disastrous marriage to yet another dissipated aristocrat, Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt. Agnes Grey also represents its titular protagonist making her living first as a governess and then as a teacher. Its representations of Victorian women working in education may have influenced the novels of Anne’s sister Charlotte Brontë, whose novel Jane Eyre (1847), published the same year as Agnes Grey, likewise has a governess protagonist and whose later novel Villette (1853) represents the struggles of young, orphaned Lucy Snow to make her living as an English teacher in France.