Agnes is supposed to teach Tom and his sisters Mary Ann and Fanny, but is ignored by her charges. Little Tom Bloomfield is arrogant and cruel, particularly to any wild animals he comes across. The Bloomfield parents are disengaged and unloving, the four children running their nurse ragged. She decides to be a governess and sets off for Wellwood and the Bloomfield family. But Agnes is a plucky young thing and sees this as an opportunity to help her family out and see something of life. Thanks to her mother’s careful management, there is no pressure for the family to do anything other than hunker down and budget carefully to get them through. Agnes is only nineteen when her father, a country parson, loses a small fortune to speculation. We have a more restrained story here with Agnes Grey, the eponymous character based on Anne Brontë’s own experiences as a governess. The characters of Mr Rochester and Heathcliffe, in many ways more anti-heroes than heroes, are impossible to forget, to say nothing of the dramatic reversals of fortune that make the stories so enthralling, the stirring settings, the passion. Anne Brontë is probably the lesser read of the three Brontë sisters, with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights constantly turning up on our screens, reimagined for new generations of viewers.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |