In Search of Anne Brontë by Nick Holland

Set out in a first-person narrative, Anne Brontë describes the almost intolerable pressures that a governess’s life involved – the isolation, away from all friends and family, the frustrations of dealing with her recalcitrant charges, the insensitive and sometimes actively cruel treatment on the part of her employers and their family. Further comparisons between Anne and her fictional heroine follow. Nick Holland observed that in writing a biography of Anne Brontë, he found in Agnes Grey ‘sixty instances that could be directly related to incidents in Anne’s own life.’ The first clue is in the opening page: ‘My father was a clergyman in the North of England…’ – as was Anne’s father. She was possessed with an urgent need to inform her contemporaries about the desperate position of unmarried, educated women in the male dominated society who were driven to take up the only ‘respectable’ career open to them in order to earn a living.

The verisimilitude of the drama is enhanced by the fact that it was drawn from Anne’s own experiences, having served as a governess in two separate households. With relentless accuracy the novel charts the dilemmas and torments that made up a governess’s life at this time. Their standing in the household and society was a peculiar, isolated state – neither family nor servant. The story provides a penetrating insight into the mid-nineteenth century world of the governess – those educated women employed to educate and control the offspring of wealthy parents.

What Anne’s novel lacks in sensationalism was made up with a fierce obsessional realism. Nothing short of genius could have set them before us so plainly and yet with restraint.’ However, George Moore, the respected Irish novelist, regarded it as, ‘The most perfect prose narrative in English letters… a narrative simple and beautiful as a muslin dress… We know we are reading a masterpiece. By contrast reviewers observed that Agnes Grey was ‘less ambitious and less repulsive.’ Although written before Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Agnes Grey was published afterwards and as a result fell under the shadow of her sister’s book and thus fared less well.

In 1846 their three narratives were ready to be sent off to publishers in London.Įmily’s novel attracted the larger share of critical attention in the form of astonishment, perplexity and outrage. Agnes Grey was Anne’s first novel, written at the time when Emily was working on Wuthering Heights and Charlotte on The Professor. Anne Brontë (1820 -1849) was the youngest and perhaps the least well known of the Brontë sisters, those brilliant northern scribes who created some of the most enduring of novels written in the first half of the nineteenth century.

In Search of Anne Brontë by Nick Holland