Then they start working out how they might make more money. Agnes’s capable, enterprising mother Alice slashes their expenses. Agnes’s family are not rich to begin with, but things really get desperate when her father Richard loses their meagre savings on a dodgy investment and slumps into depression. She always chafed at being patronised.Īnne grew up poor. When Agnes says she is frustrated because she is “always regarded as the child, and the pet of the family”, considered “too helpless and dependent – too unfit for buffeting with the cares and turmoils of life”, it feels like Anne talking. Agnes has lost even more siblings she and her older sister Mary are the only two who have “survived the perils of infancy”. Anne lost her two eldest sisters when she was five.
Both Anne and Agnes were originally one of six children. rugged hills”, so when I read the novel, I imagine the Yorkshire moors. Anne doesn’t specify where Agnes grows up, but she does say she was “born and nurtured among. The eponymous heroine is a clergyman’s daughter, just as Anne’s father, Patrick Brontë, was the perpetual curate of Haworth in Yorkshire. As she laboured away in her neat, elegant handwriting, Anne must have felt that she was writing a novel that would go off like a bomb.Īgnes Grey sticks close to the facts of Anne’s life. Although her job was difficult and thankless, she had realised that it was providing her with excellent material, that she was telling a story no one else was telling. She had to write in secret because she was skewering her haughty employers and her peremptory pupils on the page. Leaning on the desk’s writing slope (which was decadently lined in pink velvet), Anne could go on with her novel. I imagine she must have made her excuses in the evenings, and escaped the drawing room, where she had to do the boring bits of her pupils’ sewing, and often felt awkward and humiliated – excluded from the conversation because she was not considered a lady, yet not allowed to sit with the servants either, because governesses had to be something of a lady, or how could they teach their pupils to be ladies?Īnne must have stolen away to her room and pulled out her small, portable writing desk.
A nne Brontë started writing her first novel some time between 18 while she was working as a governess for the Robinson family, at Thorp Green near York.
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