Review: Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte

The forgotten or, more to the point, overlooked of the three Bronte sisters, Anne Bronte wrote just two novels before her untimely death from consumption at age 29. (A disease now better known as Tuberculosis.) The first of her two novels Agnes Grey is an insightful look at privilege and the precarious position that unmarried educated women found often themselves in during the nineteenth century. The only respectable career path available is that as a governess. But as the title character Agnes soon discovers, it is not a position that leads to respect, let along personal fulfilment.

Agnes Grey has come from a respectable family who has lost most of their income through an unfortunate event. With her father ill, she has little choice but to leave the family who has loved and sheltered her and go out into the world and take a position as a governess. With the first family, she ill prepared for the badly behaved children in her care and the flippant and often cruel attitudes of their parents. At her second post, she does a little better, overseeing the lives of a pair of privileged teenage girls who are portrayed as having very little in the way of empathy, often treating the people they consider to be inferior to themselves cruelly. And this includes an attempt at sabotaging a developing romance between Agnes and the curate, who is a most suitable match for her. Things come right in the end, though the final chapter feels a little abrupt.

Overall, this is a well told story that shares some similarities with her sister's most famous novel Jane Eyre. The novel is relatively short and a little clumsy in places but the author's insight into human nature more than makes up for its shortcomings.

Recommended.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more