In particular, Agnes's relationship with her family is implausibly perfect. Sure, families can be loving and happy. But one thing they are not is free of conflict. Yet Agnes speaks of her friends back home as if they were cardboard angels. "In my childhood," she tells us with a sniff, "I could not imagine a more afflictive punishment, than for my mother to refuse to kiss me at night: the very idea was terrible; more than the idea I never felt, for, happily, I never committed a crime that was deemed worthy of such a penalty; but once, I remember, for some transgression of my sister's, our mother thought proper to inflict it upon her; what she felt, I cannot tell; but my sympathetic tears and suffering for her sake, I shall not soon forget." There are plenty of other equally tear-drenched passages.
Maybe to Anne, this was a realistic account. No doubt she loved her family quite a bit. But I'm pretty sure she understood more than she lets on about the horrible loneliness of growing up in isolation, and I'm also sure she knew that we all have emotions like sibling jealousy and resentment which can't be explained through logic but which also don't make us wicked or ungrateful by their mere presence.
No, Anne is at her best when she's most true to life. And for those passages, we have to get Agnes Grey away from her family and into the Bloomfield and Murray households. Agnes Grey is really a novel about snobbery, and the best sections are those which deal with the condition of the governess and satirize the stupidity and cruelty of the landed and moneyed classes. Agnes is, after all, a mere "hireling, and poor clergyman's daughter," but she nonetheless insists on being treated like a human being. She even has the effrontery to be surprised when she is consistently treated as something less than that. The first time we encounter truly lyrical writing in the book is when Agnes finds herself employed in the Bloomfield household.
Here, she is governess to two of the most impossible brats imaginable, one of whom gets his kicks pulling the heads and wings off of tiny birds. Some of the descriptions of the business of raising kids now seem strange. Agnes (and Anne, we can assume) never doubts that some children are simply wicked and that the surest way to make them so is indulgence. But still, these chapters are the most vivid, the most amusing and ironic, and the most obviously realistic in the book. And for that, they aroused the most controversy. As Anne writes in her preface to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, "the story of 'Agnes Grey' was accused of extravagant over-colouring in those very parts that were carefully copied from the life, with a most scrupulous avoidance of all exaggeration." Mrs. Bloomfield, meanwhile, is a cold and heartless specimen, totally uninterested in Agnes as anything more than a difficult underling. Mr. Bloomfield is just as selfish and unsympathetic, only he is louder about it. Agnes is forever at the mercy of her heartless charges, who do whatever they want and then blame their unfortunate governess.
What's more, every guest who arrives at the Bloomfield household seems to understand implicitly that Agnes is either too wretched and insignificant to be acknowledged, or else an easy target whenever someone has to be called to account for the children's behavior. These are the passages which seem the most like real experience to us. No doubt Anne received this kind of treatment during her own days in uniform. The emotions on display in this section are very real. Anne really does understand what it is isolated among people who snub you, who view you as too uninteresting even to be worthy of their dislike. And she has enough compassion to be outraged by it.
Agnes is eventually fired for her charges' lack of progress, and she begins to look for work in other houses. She eventually winds up in the Murray household, where she is subject to a very different sort of cruelty. The children there are not so difficult and the Murrays themselves are less abrasive. But they treat Agnes like an invisible ghost and expect her to live entirely through her charges. As Mrs. Murray instructs her imperiously, "The judicious governess knows this; she knows that, will she lives in obscurity herself, her pupils' virtues and defects will be open to every eye, and, unless she loses herself in their cultivation, she need not hope for success." Agnes's irony when dealing with these people is refreshing. At one point, she tells her employer that her father may be dying and she would like to go home early.
