Anne Brontë was born at Thornton in Yorkshire on 17 January 1820, the youngest of six children. That April, the Brontës moved to Haworth, a village on the edge of the moors, where Anne’s father had become the curate. Anne’s mother died soon afterwards. She was four when her older sisters were sent to the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, where Maria and Elizabeth both caught tuberculosis and died. After that, Anne, Charlotte, Emily and Branwell were taught at home for a few years, and together, they created vivid fantasy worlds which they explored in their writing. Anne went to Roe Head School 1835–7. She worked as a governess with the Ingham family (1839–40) and with the Robinson family (1840–45). In 1846, along with Charlotte and Emily, she published Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. She published Agnes Grey in 1847 and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in 1848. That year, both Anne’s brother Branwell and her sister Emily died of tuberculosis. A fortnight later, Anne was diagnosed with the same disease. She died in Scarborough on 28 May 1849.
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Introduction copyright © Samantha Ellis 2017
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ANNE BRONTË STARTED writing her first novel sometime between 1840 and 1845 while she was working as a governess for the Robinson family, at Thorp Green near York. 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? Anne must have stolen away to her room and pulled out her small, portable writing desk. It was made of mahogany, inlaid with mother of pearl, its tiny compartments crammed with letters, manuscripts, seals, ink pots, sealing wax, pen nibs, blotting paper and various odds, ends and treasures. Leaning on the desk’s writing slope (which was decadently lined in pink velvet), Anne could go on with her novel. She had to write in secret because she was skewering her haughty employers and her peremptory pupils on the page. 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. 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.
Agnes Grey sticks close to the facts of Anne’s life. The eponymous heroine is a clergyman’s daughter, just as Anne’s father, Patrick Brontë, was the perpetual curate of Haworth in Yorkshire. Anne doesn’t specify where Agnes grows up, but she does say she was ‘born and nurtured among … rugged hills’, so when I read the novel, I imagine the Yorkshire moors. Both Anne and Agnes were originally one of six children. Anne lost her two eldest sisters when she was five. Agnes has lost even more siblings; she and her older sister Mary are the only two who have ‘survived the perils of infancy’. Both Agnes and Anne are the youngest. 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. She always chafed at being patronised.
Anne grew up poor. 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 he slumps into depression. So the women take over. Agnes’s capable, enterprising mother Alice slashes their expenses. Then they start working out how they might make more money. Mary goes for the most genteel work she can find: she starts selling her watercolours. Agnes turns to one of the only other jobs open to middle class women: she decides to become a governess. Her family scoff that she’s much too young, but she persuades them. She arrives at her first job, with the Bloomfield family (in real life, they were the Inghams), feeling a ‘rebellious flutter’ of excitement. But instead of an adventure, Agnes gets a crash course in how cruel the world can be, and how it got that way.
One of Agnes’s pupils, Tom Bloomfield, enjoys torturing birds. ‘Sometimes,’ he says, ‘I give them to the cat; sometimes I cut them in pieces with my penknife; but the next, I mean to roast alive.’ One day his vile uncle, who encourages Tom’s cruelty, gives him a nest of baby birds. When Agnes sees him ‘laying the nest on the ground, and standing over it with his legs wide apart, his hands thrust into his breeches-pockets, his body bent forward, and his face twisted into all manner of contortions in the ecstasy of his delight’ and he won’t be reasoned with, something rises within her. She grabs a large flat stone and crushes the birds flat.
This brutal mercy-killing is almost too violent to read. Agnes Grey’s first critics thought Anne had gone too far, but Anne insisted that ‘Agnes Grey was accused of extravagant over-colouring in those very parts that were carefully copied from life, with a most scrupulous avoidance of all exaggeration’. And when the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell asked Anne’s sister Charlotte if the scene with the nestlings had really happened, Charlotte replied that no one who had not been a governess really knew the dark side of so-called respectable human nature. Anne was after more than shock value; she wanted to show that Tom’s cruelty was sanctioned, even encouraged, by his family. His aggressively macho uncle Robson applauds his ‘spunk’ and congratulates him on being ‘beyond petticoat government’, while Mrs Bloomfield tells Agnes off for spoiling Tom’s fun. But Agnes argues back. She believes Tom ought to learn kindness and mercy. She has realised that Tom’s cruelty is all of a piece; whether he is torturing birds, hitting his sisters or kicking his governess, he wants to ‘persecute the lower creation’, because he sees women, girls and defenceless animals as his to exploit, abuse and oppress. After months of being wrongfooted, slighted, dissatisfied, bored, over-worked, underpaid and out of her depth – Agnes Grey is brilliant on the peculiar horror of a first job – Agnes has started to understand how the world works. Her consciousness has been raised. And then she is fired.
Anne was fired from her first job too. Undaunted, she boldly advertised for a job asking for double her previous salary, and was soon working for the Robinsons. The Robinsons’ fictional counterparts are the Murrays, and Agnes mainly teaches their two daughters. The youngest, Matilda, is a tomboy, who is just as cruel, in her way, as Tom Bloomfield. When she gleefully lets her dog savage a baby hare, it’s clear that in resisting the pressure to be ladylike, she has tipped into wanting to be as violent and careless as the men around her. The eldest, Rosalie, is being pushed into marriage with a rich man who happens also to be a rake and philanderer, and while she can, she is determined to flirt with every man in sight. Agnes finds it hard to sympathise when Rosalie decides to break the heart of the new curate, Mr Weston, especially as she quite likes him herself.
Oh, Mr Weston. He’s kind, he’s generous and he speaks from the heart. Agnes is at her most endearing when she is falling for Mr Weston. He offers her an umbrella, and she’s so flustered that all she can say is, ‘No, thank you, I don’t mind the rain’. The older Agnes acerbically remarks, ‘I always lacked common sense when taken by surprise’. Agnes’s battle with Rosalie over Mr Weston could come out of a Jane Austen novel. I’m sure Anne read Austen, and admired how mercilessly she satirised those who were obsessed with status, rank and class. Rosalie thinks she can steal Mr Weston from Agnes, because, like Tom Bloomfield, she also thinks she has the right to ‘persecute the lower creation’. So when she and Matilda visit their poorer neighbours they ‘never, in thought, exchanged places with them; and consequently, had no consideration for their feelings, regarding them as an order of beings entirely different from themselves’. They ‘call the grave elderly men and women old fools and silly old blockheads to their faces’ but expect to be adored for condescending to give them their charity. The Murrays are disrespectful to Agnes too. When they go for walks they ignore her, and when their gaze happens to fall on her ‘it seemed as if they looked on vacancy’, which makes her feel ‘like one deaf and dumb who could neither speak nor be spoken to’, and as though she has ‘ceased to be visible’. Anne’s evocation of this, and how it eats away at her sense of self, has the tang of lived experience.
Anne stuck it out with the Robinsons for five years. She was a trouper. She only left because she made the mistake of persuading the Robinsons to employ her feckless brother Branwell as tutor to their son and he spectacularly messed up by having an affair with Mrs Robinson. In her prayerbook, Anne wrote that she was ‘Sick of mankind and their disgusting ways’. When she resigned, she carried home, tucked away in her portable writing desk, a work in progress she was calling ‘Passages in the Life of an Individual’. This would become Agnes Grey.
Back in Haworth, Anne found all her siblings at home and unemployed. Her brother was convinced he’d lost the love of his life and was drowning his sorrows at the local pub. But Anne and her sisters decided to use a legacy from their aunt to write, and to publish a joint book of poetry together. They used pen names starting with the same letters as their real names. Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell was published in 1846. It only sold two copies. But by then, the sisters had started writing every day again, just as they had as children when they had written wild fantastical stories and poems, set in their own imaginary worlds.
Anne wrote every day, walked the moors, did her share of the housework, and wrote some more. Every night, she and her sisters paced round and round the dining room table, reading their work aloud and offering criticism and ideas. As Anne reworked ‘Passages in the Life of an Individual’ into Agnes Grey, Emily wrote Wuthering Heights and Charlotte wrote her first novel, The Professor. Soon they were sending out all three manuscripts, wrapped in brown paper. They were rejected again and again.
Later that year, Charlotte was in Manchester, looking after her father as he recuperated from an operation, when she started a second novel. Back home, she started reading aloud what she’d written – and Anne must have been quite surprised. Like Agnes Grey, Jane Eyre was also about a plain heroine, who was also a governess, and who also spoke directly to the reader. Later, a story would spring up about Charlotte telling her sisters that she was going to break new ground and write a heroine who wasn’t beautiful. But Anne had got there first. The moment where Agnes gazes forlornly into her mirror and can ‘discover no beauty in those marked features’ is one of the most heartfelt in the novel, and pre-empts Jane calling herself ‘poor, obscure, plain and little’.
One reason Agnes Grey has never received the acclaim it might is that Charlotte’s novel came out first. Charlotte had managed to find a decent, efficient publisher, while her sisters had unfortunately signed their novels over to a chancer called Thomas Cautley Newby. He dragged his heels until Jane Eyre became a bestseller, at which point he realised he might make some money out of publishing two more novels by the mysterious Bell family. So Anne’s first novel came out in December 1847, along with Wuthering Heights, two months after Charlotte’s. Agnes Grey was reviewed as a pale imitation of Jane Eyre. One critic even unwittingly guessed at the sisters’ relationship by saying Agnes was ‘a sort of younger sister to Jane Eyre’, adding, upsettingly, that she was ‘inferior to her in every way’.
I disagree with the critics of the day, who barely noticed Anne’s political engagement – her sharp portrait of a class-ridden society, or her argument that when education is not valued, children grow up ill-equipped for life, unable to be happy or kind. Rosalie ends up miserably married to her rake and can’t even seek solace in her baby daughter because she thinks she will grow up to eclipse her, and because centring all her hopes in a child would be, she says, ‘only one degree better than devoting oneself to a dog’. We never find out what happens to Tom Bloomfield, but Arthur Huntingdon, the anti-hero of Anne’s second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, is a boy who has been spoiled and indulged and has become a selfish man who abuses his wife. In that novel, too, Anne is scathing about the way boys are educated to behave badly, and girls are educated to be vulnerable.
Barely anyone noticed, either, that Anne had written an exposé of governessing, in contrast to Charlotte’s highly romanticised view of the profession. The reports of the Governesses’ Benevolent Institution, a charity set up to help governesses in 1841, make it clear that very few real governesses were blessed, like Jane Eyre, with a handsome, intelligent boss, a motherly housekeeper and just one sweet pupil. Agnes’s experience was much closer to the truth and many women had an even worse time of it. Charlotte hated governessing and in her letters she railed about its petty humiliations, backbreaking work, and appalling pay. But none of that made it into her novel. Anne wanted her novel to speak to some of the 25,000 women working as governesses in the 1840s and to their employers too. But instead, Jane Eyre became the governess novel.
Agnes is a quieter heroine than Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights’s Cathy Earnshaw, but she does burn with her own anger. And Agnes Grey is often a furious novel, and I feel, a feminist novel. Its main concern is how a woman can do what Agnes wants to do at the start: ‘to go out into the world; to act for myself; to exercise my unused faculties; to try my own unknown powers’. It asks big questions: how can you search for empowerment when the world is cruel and unfair, and the odds are stacked against you? Can you get what you want without hurting other people in the process? How can you find love? Which brings me back to Mr Weston. It’s striking that while Anne’s sisters wrote heroes who were dark, brooding and malevolent, Anne provided her heroine with a hero who was actually nice to women. This still feels revolutionary.
Samantha Ellis, 2017
ALL TRUE HISTORIES contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity that the dry, shrivelled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut. Whether this be the case with my history or not, I am hardly competent to judge; I sometimes think it might prove useful to some, and entertaining to others, but the world may judge for itself: shielded by my own obscurity, and by the lapse of years, and a few fictitious names, I do not fear to venture, and will candidly lay before the public what I would not disclose to the most intimate friend.
My father was a clergyman of the north of England, who was deservedly respected by all who knew him, and, in his younger days, lived pretty comfortably on the joint income of a small incumbency, and a snug little property of his own. My mother, who married him against the wishes of her friends, was a squire’s daughter, and a woman of spirit. In vain it was represented to her that, if she became the poor parson’s wife, she must relinquish her carriage and her lady’s-maid, and all the luxuries and elegancies of affluence, which to her were little less than the necessaries of life. A carriage and a lady’s-maid were great conveniences; but, thank Heaven, she had feet to carry her, and hands to minister to her own necessities. An elegant house and spacious grounds were not to be despised, but she would rather live in a cottage with Richard Grey, than in a palace with any other man in the world.
Finding arguments of no avail, her father, at length, told the lovers they might marry if they pleased, but, in so doing, his daughter would forfeit every fraction of her fortune. He expected this would cool the ardour of both; but he was mistaken. My father knew too well my mother’s superior worth, not to be sensible that she was a valuable fortune in herself; and if she would but consent to embellish his humble hearth, he should be happy to take her on any terms; while she, on her part, would rather labour with her own hands than be divided from the man she loved, whose happiness it would be her joy to make, and who was already one with her in heart and soul. So her fortune went to swell the purse of a wiser sister, who had married a rich nabob, and she, to the wonder and compassionate regret of all who knew her, went to bury herself in the homely village parsonage among the hills of—. And yet, in spite of all this, and in spite of my mother’s high spirit, and my father’s whims, I believe you might search all England through, and fail to find a happier couple.
Of six children, my sister Mary and myself were the only two that survived the perils of infancy and early childhood. I, being the younger by five or six years, was always regarded as the child, and the pet of the family – father, mother, and sister, all combined to spoil me – not by foolish indulgence to render me fractious and ungovernable, but by ceaseless kindness to make me too helpless and dependent, too unfit for buffeting with the cares and turmoils of life.
Mary and I were brought up in the strictest seclusion. My mother, being at once highly accomplished, well informed, and fond of employment, took the whole charge of our education on herself, with the exception of Latin – which my father undertook to teach us – so that we never even went to school; and as there was no society in the neighbourhood, our only intercourse with the world consisted in a stately tea-party, now and then, with the principal farmers and tradespeople of the vicinity, just to avoid being stigmatized as too proud to consort with our neighbours, and an annual visit to our paternal grandfather’s, where himself, our kind grandmamma, a maiden aunt, and two or three elderly ladies and gentlemen were the only persons we ever saw. Sometimes our mother would amuse us with stories and anecdotes of her younger days, which, while they entertained us amazingly, frequently awoke – in me, at least – a vague and secret wish to see a little more of the world.
I thought she must have been very happy; but she never seemed to regret past times. My father, however, whose temper was neither tranquil nor cheerful by nature, often unduly vexed himself with thinking of the sacrifices his dear wife had made for him, and troubled his head with revolving endless schemes for the augmentation of his little fortune, for her sake, and ours. In vain my mother assured him she was quite satisfied, and if he would but lay by a little for the children, we should all have plenty, both for time present and to come: but saving was not my father’s forte: he would not run in debt, (at least, my mother took good care he should not,) but while he had money, he must spend it; he liked to see his house comfortable, and his wife and daughters well clothed, and well attended; and besides, he was charitably disposed, and liked to give to the poor, according to his means, or, as some might think, beyond them.
At length, however, a kind friend suggested to him a means of doubling his private property at one stroke; and further increasing it, hereafter, to an untold amount. This friend was a merchant, a man of enterprising spirit and undoubted talent; who was somewhat straitened in his mercantile pursuits for want of capital, but generously proposed to give my father a fair share of his profits, if he would only intrust him with what he could spare, and he thought he might safely promise that whatever sum the latter chose to put into his hands, it should bring him in cent per cent. The small patrimony was speedily sold, and the whole of its price was deposited in the hands of the friendly merchant, who as promptly proceeded to ship his cargo, and prepare for his voyage.
My father was delighted, so were we all, with our brightening prospects: for the present, it is true, we were reduced to the narrow income of the curacy; but my father seemed to think there was no necessity for scrupulously restricting our expenditure to that: so, with a standing bill at Mr Jackson’s, another at Smith’s, and a third at Hobson’s, we got along even more comfortably than before: though my mother affirmed we had better keep within bounds, for our prospects of wealth were but precarious after all; and if my father would only trust everything to her management, he should never feel himself stinted; but he, for once, was incorrigible.
What happy hours Mary and I have past, while sitting at our work by the fire, or wandering on the heath-clad hills, or idling under the weeping birch, (the only considerable tree in the garden,) talking of future happiness to ourselves and our parents, of what we would do, and see, and possess; with no firmer foundation for our goodly superstructure, than the riches that were expected to flow in upon us from the success of the worthy merchant’s speculations. Our father was nearly as bad as ourselves; only, that he affected not to be so much in earnest, expressing his bright hopes and sanguine expectations in jests and playful sallies that always struck me as being exceedingly witty and pleasant. Our mother laughed with delight to see him so hopeful and happy; but still she feared he was setting his heart too much upon the matter; and once, I heard her whisper as she left the room,
‘God grant he be not disappointed! I know not how he would bear it.’
Disappointed he was; and bitterly too. It came like a thunderclap on us all that the vessel which contained our fortune had been wrecked, and gone to the bottom with all its stores, together with several of the crew, and the unfortunate merchant himself. I was grieved for him; I was grieved for the overthrow of all our air-built castles; but, with the elasticity of youth, I soon recovered the shock.
Though riches had charms, poverty had no terrors for an inexperienced girl like me. Indeed, to say the truth, there was something exhilarating in the idea of being driven to straits, and thrown upon our own resources. I only wished papa, mama, and Mary were all of the same mind as myself and then, instead of lamenting past calamities, we might all cheerfully set to work to remedy them; and the greater the difficulties, the harder our present privations – the greater should be our cheerfulness to endure the latter, and our vigour to contend against the former.
Mary did not lament, but she brooded continually over the misfortune, and sank into a state of dejection from which no effort of mine could rouse her. I could not possibly bring her to regard the matter on its bright side as I did; and indeed I was so fearful of being charged with childish frivolity, or stupid insensibility, that I carefully kept most of my bright ideas and cheering notions to myself, well knowing they could not be appreciated.
My mother thought only of consoling my father, and paying our debts and retrenching our expenditure by every available means; but my father was completely overwhelmed by the calamity – health, strength, and spirits sunk beneath the blow; and he never wholly recovered them. In vain my mother strove to cheer him by appealing to his piety, to his courage, to his affection for herself and us. That very affection was his greatest torment: it was for our sakes he had so ardently longed to increase his fortune – it was our interest that had lent such brightness to his hopes, and that imparted such bitterness to his present distress. He now tormented himself with remorse at having neglected my mother’s advice, which would at least have saved him from the additional burden of debt – he vainly reproached himself for having brought her from the dignity, the ease, the luxury of her former station to toil with him through the cares and toils of poverty. It was gall and wormwood to his soul to see that splendid, highly accomplished woman, once so courted and admired, transformed into an active managing housewife, with hands and head continually occupied with household labours and household economy. The very willingness with which she performed these duties, the cheerfulness with which she bore her reverses, and the kindness which withheld her from imputing the smallest blame to him, were all perverted by this ingenious self-tormentor into further aggravations of his sufferings. And thus the mind preyed upon the body, and disordered the system of the nerves, and they in turn increased the troubles of the mind, till by action, and re-action, his health was seriously impaired; and not one of us could convince him that the aspect of our affairs was not half so gloomy, so utterly hopeless as his morbid imagination represented it to be.
The useful pony phaeton was sold, together with the stout well-fed pony – the old favourite that we had fully determined should end its days in peace, and never pass from our hands; the little coach-house and stable were let, the servant boy, and the more efficient (being the more expensive) of the two maid servants were dismissed. Our clothes were mended, turned, and darned to the utmost verge of decency; our food, always plain, was now simplified to an unprecedented degree – except my father’s favourite dishes: our coals and candles were painfully economized – the pair of candles reduced to one, and that most sparingly used: the coals carefully husbanded in the half empty grate, especially when my father was out on his parish duties, or confined to bed through illness – then we sat with our feet on the fender, scraping the perishing embers together from time to time, and occasionally adding a slight scattering of the dust and fragments of coal, just to keep them alive. As for our carpets, they in time were worn threadbare, and patched and darned even to a greater extent than our garments. To save the expense of a gardener, Mary and I undertook to keep the garden in order; and all the cooking and household work, that could not easily be managed by one servant girl, was done by my mother and sister, with a little occasional help from me – only a little, because, though a woman in my own estimation, I was still a child in theirs; and my mother, like most active, managing women, was not gifted with very active daughters; for this reason – that being so clever and diligent herself, she was never tempted to trust her affairs to a deputy, but on the contrary, was willing to act and think for others as well as for number one; and whatever was the business in hand, she was apt to think that no one could do it so well as herself; so that whenever I offered to assist her, I received such an answer as – ‘No, love, you cannot indeed – there’s nothing here you can do. Go and help your sister, or get her to take a walk with you – tell her she must not sit so much, and stay so constantly in the house as she does – she may well look thin and dejected.’
‘Mary, mama says I’m to help you; or get you to take a walk with me; she says you may well look thin and dejected, if you sit so constantly in the house.’
‘Help me you cannot, Agnes; and I cannot go out with you – I have far too much to do.’
‘Then let me help you.’
‘You cannot indeed, dear child. Go and practise your music, or play with the kitten.’
There was always plenty of sewing on hand; but I had not been taught to cut out a single garment; and except plain hemming and seaming, there was little I could do, even in that line; for they both asserted, that it was far easier to do the work themselves, than to prepare it for me; and besides they liked better to see me prosecuting my studies, or amusing myself – it was time enough for me to sit bending over my work like a grave matron, when my favourite little pussy was become a steady old cat. Under such circumstances, although I was not many degrees more useful than the kitten, my idleness was not entirely without excuse.
Through all our troubles, I never but once heard my mother complain of our want of money. As summer was coming on, she observed to Mary and me,
‘What a desirable thing it would be for your papa to spend a few weeks at a watering place. I am convinced the sea air and the change of scene would be of incalculable service to him. But then you see there’s no money,’ she added with a sigh.
We both wished exceedingly that the thing might be done, and lamented greatly that it could not.
‘Well, well!’ said she, ‘it’s no use complaining. Possibly something might be done to further the project after all. Mary, you are a beautiful drawer. What do you say to doing a few more pictures, in your best style, and getting them framed, with the water-colour drawings you have already done, and trying to dispose of them to some liberal picture-dealer, who has the sense to discern their merits?’
‘Mama, I should be delighted, if you think they could be sold; and for anything worth while.’
‘It’s worth while trying, however, my dear: do you procure the drawings, and I’ll endeavour to find a purchaser.’
‘I wish I could do something,’ said I.
‘You, Agnes! well, who knows? You draw pretty well too; if you choose some simple piece for your subject, I dare say you will be able to produce something we shall all be proud to exhibit.’
‘But I have another scheme in my head, mama, and have had long … only I did not like to mention it.’
‘Indeed! pray tell us what it is.’
‘I should like to be a governess.’
My mother uttered an exclamation of surprise, and laughed. My sister dropped her work in astonishment, exclaiming, ‘You a governess, Agnes! What can you be dreaming of?’
‘Well! I don’t see anything so very extraordinary in it. I do not pretend to be able to instruct great girls; but surely I could teach little ones … and I should like it so much … I am so fond of children. Do let me, mama!’
‘But my love, you have not learnt to take care of yourself yet; and young children require more judgment and experience to manage than elder ones.’
‘But mama, I am above eighteen, and quite able to take care of myself, and others too. You do not know half the wisdom and prudence I possess, because I have never been tried.’
‘Only think,’ said Mary, ‘what would you do in a house full of strangers, without me or mama to speak and act for you … with a parcel of children, besides yourself, to attend to; and no one to look to for advice? You would not even know what clothes to put on.’
‘You think, because I always do as you bid me, I have no judgment of my own: but only try me – that is all I ask – and you shall see what I can do.’
At that moment my father entered, and the subject of our discussion was explained to him.
‘What, my little Agnes, a governess!’ cried he, and, in spite of his dejection, he laughed at the idea.
‘Yes, papa, don’t you say anything against it; I should like it so much; and I’m sure I could manage delightfully.’
‘But, my darling, we could not spare you.’ And a tear glistened in his eye as he added – ‘No, no! afflicted as we are, surely we are not brought to that pass yet.’
‘Oh, no!’ said my mother. ‘There is no necessity, whatever, for such a step; it is merely a whim of her own. So you must hold your tongue, you naughty girl, for though you are so ready to leave us, you know very well, we cannot part with you.’
I was silenced for that day, and for many succeeding ones; but still, I did not wholly relinquish my darling scheme. Mary got her drawing materials, and steadily set to work. I got mine too; but while I drew, I thought of other things.
How delightful it would be to be a governess! To go out into the world; to enter upon a new life; to act for myself; to exercise my unused faculties; to try my unknown powers; to earn my own maintenance, and something to comfort and help my father, mother, and sister, besides exonerating them from the provision of my food and clothing; to show papa what his little Agnes could do; to convince mama and Mary that I was not quite the helpless, thoughtless being they supposed. And then, how charming to be intrusted with the care and education of children! Whatever others said, I felt I was fully competent to the task: the clear remembrance of my own thoughts and feelings in early childhood would be a surer guide than the instructions of the most mature adviser. I had but to turn from my little pupils to myself at their age, and I should know, at once, how to win their confidence and affections; how to waken the contrition of the erring; how to embolden the timid, and console the afflicted; how to make Virtue practicable, Instruction desirable, and Religion lovely and comprehensible.
‘– Delightful task!
To teach the young idea how to shoot!’
To train the tender plants, and watch their buds unfolding day by day! Influenced by so many inducements, I determined still to persevere; though the fear of displeasing my mother, or distressing my father’s feelings, prevented me from resuming the subject for several days. At length, again, I mentioned it to my mother in private, and, with some difficulty, got her to promise to assist me with her endeavours. My father’s reluctant consent was next obtained, and then, though Mary still sighed her disapproval, my dear, kind mother began to look out for a situation for me. She wrote to my father’s relations, and consulted the newspaper advertisements – her own relations she had long dropped all communication with – a formal interchange of occasional letters was all she had ever had since her marriage, and she would not, at any time, have applied to them in a case of this nature. But so long and so entire had been my parent’s seclusion from the world, that many weeks elapsed before a suitable situation could be procured. At last, to my great joy, it was decreed that I should take charge of the young family of a certain Mrs Bloomfield, whom my kind, prim Aunt Grey had known in her youth, and asserted to be a very nice woman. Her husband was a retired tradesman, who had realized a very comfortable fortune, but could not be prevailed upon to give a greater salary than twenty-five pounds to the instructress of his children. I, however, was glad to accept this, rather than refuse the situation – which my parents were inclined to think the better plan.
But some weeks more were yet to be devoted to preparation. How long, how tedious those weeks appeared to me! Yet they were happy ones in the main – full of bright hopes, and ardent expectations. With what peculiar pleasure I assisted at the making of my new clothes, and, subsequently, the packing of my trunks! But there was a feeling of bitterness mingling with the latter occupation too – and when it was done, when all was ready for my departure on the morrow, and the last night at home approached, a sudden anguish seemed to swell my heart. My dear friends looked so sad, and spoke so very kindly, that I could scarcely keep my eyes from overflowing; but I still affected to be gay. I had taken my last ramble with Mary on the moors, my last walk in the garden, and round the house; I had fed, with her, our pet pigeons for the last time – the pretty creatures that we had tamed to peck their food from our hands. I had given a farewell stroke to all their silky backs as they crowded in my lap. I had tenderly kissed my own peculiar favourites, the pair of snow-white fantails; I had played my last tune on the old familiar piano, and sung my last song to papa; not the last, I hoped, but the last for what appeared to me a very long time; and, perhaps, when I did these things again, it would be with different feelings; circumstances might be changed, and this house might never be my settled home again.
My dear little friend, the kitten, would certainly be changed; she was already growing a fine cat; and when I returned, even for a hasty visit at Christmas, would most likely have forgotten both her playmate and her merry pranks. I had romped with her for the last time; and when I stroked her soft bright fur, while she lay purring herself to sleep in my lap, it was with a feeling of sadness I could not easily disguise. Then, at bed-time,