But now let's dive into the novel itself. Anne begins with a statement of intent. Vide the famous line, "All true stories contain instruction." Agnes is presented as a young woman writing her memoirs with a "few fictitious names." But we have to wonder whether the chief fictitious name isn't "Agnes Grey," for which we should read "Anne Bronte." Is the character just a stand-in for Anne? In Charlotte's Shirley, there is a character whose mother's name is Agnes Grey-and she is thought by many to be a representation of Anne. But whether Agnes is in fact Anne is beside the point. What is important is that the novel doesn't pretend to anything beyond the common-place. The only "instruction" we'll get out of it is what a governess herself might get from real life.
The scene and scenario are suspiciously similar to that of Anne. Agnes Grey is raised in a parsonage. She is the daughter of a poor clergyman and a wealthy woman (whose family disapproves of the match). And she takes a position as a governess in order to provide for her family. There is none of the thunder and lightning of, say, Wuthering Heights in the writing. You have to wonder what people thought when they first came upon that bound volume of the two novels. Anne's prose is even sloppy at times.
Take this sentence, for instance, when Agnes is trying to make us understand her condition as a governess to two wild and uncontrollable children: "[The work was] a more arduous task than any one can imagine, who has not felt something like the misery of being charged with the care and direction of a set of mischievous, turbulent rebels, whom his utmost exertions cannot bind to their duty, while, at the same time, he is responsible for their conduct to a higher power, who exacts from him what cannot be achieved without the aid of the superior's more potent authority, which, either from indolence, or the fear of becoming unpopular with the said rebellious gang, the latter refuses to give." It's a fairly simple rule of writing that you either explain a particular situation or you use a general metaphor to make it clear. But this sentence walks a dangerous line somewhere between the two. Many of the book's longer sentences read like this: as though Anne were engaged in a life or death struggle with her pen, forcing her way through the thought whether it was well-expressed or not.
And at times, the ordinariness of it all goes beyond a realistic account and ends up simply being poor novel-writing. The third chapter, for example, ends with these words, after Agnes has discovered her vacation will be cut short by her employer: "Yet she was not to blame in this; I had never told her my feelings, and she could not be expected to divine them; I had not been with her a full term, and she was justified in not allowing me a full vacation." Apart from being oddly self-effacing, this sentence is no way to end a chapter. There's no kick, no spunk to the writing, and if these things are needed anywhere, they are needed at the end of a chapter.
Anne also seems to have particular trouble with the occasional authorial intervention. These brief bits of editorializing can be found in just about any 19th-century novel, and you either like them or you don't. But the ones in Agnes Grey are particularly clumsy. Of course, the novel is written in the first person, so anytime Agnes tells us anything about herself she, as the purported author of the fictional memoir, is editorializing. But when I say authorial interventions, I mean the points at which Agnes stops the story entirely to comment on the actual writing. You get the feeling that Anne is a little embarrassed by the fact that she is essentially telling us the story of a job. Not that she should be.
After all, I know I, for one, get tired of having everything ordinary slashed from the events of a novel. Most writers would worry that they were boring their readers if they spelled out for us how much a character earns per week, what they eat for lunch, what time they wake up in the morning, and so forth. Anne worries about this too, but she does it anyway. And looking back, the parts in Agnes Grey which make for the best reading are those which deal with the simple everyday business of being a governess. Part of what makes Agnes Grey a unique novel is that it includes talk of wages, vacation days, and work hours. And instead of being bored, we are happy to see these things in print, because they are so much a part of our lives but are passed over so often in literature.
But Agnes (or Anne, whichever you prefer), keeps stopping the narrative to apologize for these things. Here, for example: "I have not enumerated half the vexatious propensities of my pupils," she tells us, "for fear of trespassing too much upon the reader's patience, as, perhaps, I have already done; but my design, in writing the last few pages, was not to amuse, but to benefit those whom it might concern: he that has no interest in such matters will doubtless have skipped them over with a cursory glance, and, perhaps, a malediction against the prolixity of the writer..." and so on. There are several passages like this which seem to say, "Don't worry-I know this isn't very interesting. But I'll make up for it later on." She shouldn't apologize for the things she chooses to write about, and by doing so, she loses a bit of her authority as writer. The novel isn't boring, but it starts to seem that way when the novelist interrupts the narrative to tell us that it is.
There are plenty of other shortcomings I could point out. For instance, there are times when Anne falls short of her own Realism. She claims her book is to be a completely true to life account, but you can detect hints, here and there, of the familiar faults of pre-Realist novels. Not that Realist novels are necessarily better than their predecessors. But almost all novels written before Madame Bovary suffer from a certain fear of irrational emotion. The pre-Realists were horrified by the fact that not all human feelings can be explained through a cold analysis of morality and reason. Spouses should love one another, so they always do, in pre-Realist novels. Children should be devoted to their parents and vice versa, so they always are. Unless, of course, they are "wicked." Agnes Grey has a lot of these improbable emotions, which, no doubt, were meant to be moving at the time but which actually come off as just the opposite, since they are so hard to believe.
