65 pages • 2 hours read
Anne BrontëAgnes Grey
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1847A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
The story opens with the narrator, Agnes Grey, speaking in the first person, stating that she will relate her history in hopes that her story may be instructive. She describes her family situation. Her father, Richard Grey, is a clergyman with a living in the north of England, and her mother is a squire’s daughter who gave up her wealth and her family to marry him, happily so. Of their six children, only Mary and Agnes survived childhood. Agnes, younger by five or six years, has been sheltered to the point that she worries she is “too helpless and too dependent—too unfit for buffeting the cares and turmoils of life” (4).
Her father taught them Latin and their mother, an accomplished woman, was otherwise in charge of their education. They did not have much society, and Agnes admits she always harbored a secret wish to see more of the world.
They had enough income to live comfortably, if not well, but her father was persuaded to invest all their money in a shipping venture, and they were left impoverished when the ship sank. The calamity ruined her father’s nerves and health. Her mother has dedicated herself to reducing their household expenses and being as thrifty as possible. Agnes secretly sees the situation as an opportunity to test herself and show cheerful fortitude in the face of adversity. However, she is treated as a child and not allowed to help her mother with household tasks, which makes her feel frustrated and useless.
Mary is recruited to help the family by selling her watercolor paintings, and Agnes announces that she would like to be a governess. Her family laughs at the idea, believing Agnes can barely take care of herself. Agnes thinks she would be good at taking care of children since she is only 18 and remembers what childhood was like. She has a romantic notion that such a position would solve all her problems and is convinced that guiding young minds would be charming and delightful work.
Reflecting on the prospect, she thinks:
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 […] to show papa what his little Agnes could do; to convince mamma and Mary that I was not quite the helpless, thoughtless being they supposed (9-10).
Her mother finds her a position with Mrs. Bloomfield, said to be a very nice woman, the wife of a tradesman with a comfortable fortune. They will pay her £25 a year. Agnes prepares with enthusiasm for her new position but, on the eve of her departure, finds it bittersweet to leave. She takes a last walk around the gardens and the moors, feeds and strokes her pet pigeons, plays her piano, and says goodbye to her kitten. In the morning, she feels hopeful as she says goodbye to her family, asking God to bless them, but beneath her veil, she bursts into tears as the hired gig drives her away. The driver comments on the cold wind, and as they climb out of the valley, Agnes turns to look back. She sees a weak ray of sunlight falling on the parsonage and the spire of the church, casting the rest of the village into shade.
Chapter 2 Summary
It is a cold drive, and Agnes is nervous and self-conscious when she arrives at Wellwood, but she counsels herself to remain calm. She meets Mrs. Bloomfield, who has a chilly manner and cold, grey eyes. In her bedroom, Agnes looks in dismay in the mirror, noting her pale face and reddened hands, tangled hair, and rumpled collar. At luncheon, she finds Mrs. Bloomfield frigid, formal, and awful. Agnes struggles to converse and enjoy her meal, which is not well prepared.
After lunch, Agnes meets the children she will tutor. Her mother describes them as clever and ready to learn. Tom, the eldest at seven, she says is “a generous, noble-spirited boy” (15). Mary Ann is six, and Fanny is nearly four. As they show Agnes the schoolroom, Tom is belligerent to Mary Ann and whips his rocking horse when he rides it, for which Agnes reproves him. When the children show Agnes their garden, Tom gives Agnes a flower and tells her how he torments the birds he traps. When she says that is wicked, he answers that his father and uncle encourage him. While Agnes finds Tom’s manner unpleasant, she hopes she will win his affection and be able to guide him to better behavior.
After the children go to bed, Agnes joins Mrs. Bloomfield for a meager supper. She is disappointed to find her employer “cold, grave, and forbidding—the very opposite of the kind warm-hearted matron [Agnes’s] hopes had depicted her to be” (18).
Chapter 3 Summary
Facing her first day as a governess, Agnes tries to be optimistic about her situation, but she finds that dressing Mary Ann is a trial, and the children are difficult to teach. Tom dislikes exerting himself, and Mary Ann can barely read. When they go outside, rather than following Agnes’s direction, the children insist she follow them. While they are playing in the garden, Mr. Bloomfield rides up and scolds Agnes for letting the children get dirty. Agnes is shocked that “he should speak so uncivilly to [her], their governess, and a perfect stranger to himself” (20). Mr. Bloomfield displays more of his bad temper at lunch when he scolds his wife over how the meal is prepared. Agnes is uncomfortable and embarrassed.
Agnes finds instructing the children arduous. They are disobedient and delight in challenging her. Tom is bossy and recalcitrant, and he lashes out verbally and physically. Agnes wishes she could box his ears or switch him with a birch rod, but she is determined not to strike the children. “Patience, Firmness, and Perseverance, were my only weapons,” she tells the reader, “and these I resolved to use to the utmost” (22). She does her best to remain pleasant and kind, to use reason and affection, and try to teach them Christian humility. Agnes hopes that by demonstrating firmness, integrity, and kindness, she will benefit the children and gain the approval of their parents.
It has little effect. Tom fights her on lessons, and Agnes often has to resort to holding him down until he finishes the tasks she assigned. Mary Ann is even more exasperating; she lies on the floor during lessons and refuses to repeat the words Agnes tries to teach her. Agnes is driven sometimes to shake her or pull her hair, at which Mary Ann screams until her mother comes and scolds Agnes. Agnes is astonished that the children seem immune to the promise of affection and tenderness as a reward, which so motivated her as a child.
Little Fanny is no better. She acts docile around her parents but with Agnes, she is mischievous and disobedient. Agnes is mortified when Mrs. Bloomfield comments to Mr. Bloomfield that the children seem to be growing worse in their behavior rather than improving. She resolves to try harder to succeed. She hopes her salary will help with the economic circumstances at home, and she wants to show her family that their doubts in her were unfounded. Agnes is allowed to return home for two weeks for a Christmas holiday and keeps her complaints to herself.
Chapter 4 Summary
In a direct address to her readers, Agnes says that she has not told the whole of her trials “for fear of trespassing too much upon the reader’s patience” (28). She hopes her story will benefit a parent or governess who is reading. Conscious of what her family and friends would think to see her in such a difficult situation, Agnes pities herself but does not often indulge in weeping.
One afternoon in January, the children are particularly naughty, and instead of taking lessons, they run outside and play in the snow. Mr. Bloomfield roars at them to come inside, and the children obey instantly, upon which he chides Agnes for having no control over them. Agnes is humiliated when she overhears Mr. Bloomfield’s mother, who is visiting, wondering if Agnes is a “proper person.” She had thought the older woman sympathetic to her situation, for, Agnes admits, “Kindness, which had been the food of my life through so many years, had lately been so entirely denied me, that I welcomed with grateful joy the slightest semblance of it” (31).
Hurt by this betrayal, Agnes tries to remain civil to the elder Mrs. Bloomfield, but she suspects the woman is turning the parents against her. Both are increasingly vigilant when Agnes is with the children, defeat her when she tries to discipline them, and then reprove her when the children are disorderly and misbehave. Even Betty, the children’s nurse, pities Agnes and says so before she is let go for whipping the children, which Mrs. Bloomfield forbade her to do.
Chapter 5 Summary
Agnes is uncomfortable when guests visit the house, for they usually ignore her. She especially dislikes Mr. Robson, Mrs. Bloomfield’s brother. He is scornful of everything to do with women, and Agnes dislikes the influence he has on the children. He encourages Mary Ann to be vain, an impulse Agnes has tried to stifle, and he encourages Tom to be cruel.
Agnes has worked hard to instill her values and sense of morality and justice in Tom, so she is horrified when he brings her a set of nestlings his uncle gave him. To prevent Tom from torturing them, Agnes takes a large stone and drops it on the nest, killing the baby birds. Uncle Robson, pausing to kick his dog, laughs at Tom’s anger and applauds that Tom is “beyond petticoat government already […] he defies mother, granny, governess, all!” (37).
Mrs. Bloomfield scolds Agnes for spoiling Tom’s entertainment, saying creatures are created for human convenience. Agnes protests that it is better to show mercy. Mrs. Bloomfield continues to reprove Agnes for her children’s poor behavior while doing nothing to correct it herself. In May, Mrs. Bloomfield tells Agnes that her services are no longer needed. Agnes feels unjustly accused, but she tells the reader she has been “seasoned by adversity, and tutored by experience” (40). She wants to try again, and this time she hopes she might find a better situation and redeem herself to her family.
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
Like many 19th-century novels, Agnes Grey opens with the fiction that the narrator is telling a personal history. While novels, especially sensation novels, were often considered frivolous entertainment that overexcited the imagination, a personal history could be seen, as Anne suggests here, as instructive. Throughout, the narrator will maintain that she is drawing her stories from a diary but is consciously shaping her narrative for the reader’s instruction and enjoyment. Agnes writes as if her book is a correspondence with the reader, sharing her actions, conversations, and thoughts while anticipating a response.
These direct addresses to the reader add an element of immediacy and contribute to identification with Agnes. They also give the impression that the author, Anne, speaks directly from experience. This device allows for playful moments, where Anne/Agnes expresses the hope that she is not boring her reader, as well as ironic distance when Anne/Agnes handles moments of intense emotional turmoil. At other times, the narrator departs from the story to offer reflections that are typically moralizing comments, brief philosophizing, or examples of self-disciplining emotions and thoughts.
This sense of autobiography is heightened by the respects in which Agnes’s situation resembles the author’s. Agnes is the daughter of a clergyman who holds a living in the north of England, among a landscape she describes as rugged. They live in quiet seclusion and are not rich. Agnes, like Anne, is 18 when she takes her first post as a governess. However, other elements resist autobiography. Mary is five or six years older, and the sisters do not seem particularly close. The girls are educated at home. Most importantly, their mother is alive; Mrs. Grey is a staunch role model whom Agnes looks up to. Her mother’s marriage to her father, for which she gave up her rank and wealth, forms the background of Agnes’s expectations about love and marriage.
Agnes’s response to her family’s economic distress shows her initial innocence as well as her fortitude, work ethic, and wish for a community. When she has no chance to exercise these within the family unit, she looks for a way to test her skills outside it. Being a governess is one of the few career options for a girl of her class, and Agnes’s romanticized visions of the job show how little she knows of the world. Her wish to prove her family wrong shows a hint of pride and rebellion in addition to her longing to be useful. She realizes how sheltered she has been when she meets the Bloomfields, whose fractious relationships, condescending attitudes, and lack of discipline are so different from her own upbringing.
To readers and critics who expressed shock or assumed that Anne was exaggerating certain incidents in her narrative, she responded in the preface to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall that she had actually moderated some of the horrors she experienced. Because of this, many readers have presumed that Anne drew on her governessing experience with the Ingham family in creating the Bloomfields. Certainly, readers who share the values of compliance, kindness, modesty, helpfulness, and self-restraint with Agnes would be appalled by the Bloomfields’ behavior.
Through Agnes, Anne offers a quiet critique of Victorian ideas about education, child-rearing, and gender. She suggests that the sly, difficult, and headstrong natures of the Bloomfield children are due to a lack of proper discipline or oversight by the parents. She shows the impossible position Agnes is in; her pupils won’t obey her when they see her treated like a servant, and neither the parents nor their children respect her authority or knowledge. Since she is not allowed to punish them, and they do not care to earn her regard, Agnes has little power to teach them or influence their behavior.
Agnes is humiliated when these failings are read as deficiencies of her abilities or character rather than the paradox of her situation. While she stays true to her moral framework by resolving to apply more effort, Agnes uses her experiences to show that a governess has no power over children’s natures, which are influenced by family, for better or for worse. In the 19th century, corporal punishment was generally acceptable to correct children who did not behave. Betty, the nurse, holds this viewpoint. That gentle Agnes is drawn to slap Mary Ann and wishes she could use a birch rod on Tom shows how much her innocence is being tested by her charges.
Uncle Robson reflects the common Victorian belief that women are valued mainly for appearance and conduct. In contrast, masculinity is expressed not only by resistance to female influence but by a violent disregard for the well-being of other creatures. Agnes’s strong opposition to this assumption of superiority comes out in the episode with the birds. Her attachment to animals, shown by her affection for her childhood pets, makes it intolerable to her that Tom should entertain himself by torturing the birds or that his uncle should encourage him. Her shocking move to kill the baby birds herself shows how fiercely she holds to her own moral principles. Her swift, decisive action here—violent yet merciful—provides a counterpoint to Uncle Robson’s assumptions about women’s roles and capabilities.
There’s a subtle suggestion that the Bloomfields’ attitudes and conduct, which Agnes finds coarse, are connected to their status; Mr. Bloomfield made his fortune in trade, though his business is not specified, and they are trying to become members of the land-owning class. Agnes, of genteel birth, holds to more “correct” principles and behaviors, which are integral to what we think of now as ideals of Victorian Middle-Class Morality. While the Bloomfields resist improvement, later examples in the book suggest that morality and Christian virtues can cross class boundaries, ennobling one in spirit if not in status.
As she will throughout the novel, Anne uses the landscape and weather to foreshadow the emotional tenor of a situation. In syntax, the writing bears the frequent periodic and dilating sentences and punctuation typical to the 19th-century novel. Agnes’s voice as a narrator is mature and confident, adding to the impression that she is looking back on events in her life from a distance. For the most part, the narration seems sincere, but the occasional irony or dry humor in Agnes’s observations suggests that Anne (as comparisons to Jane Austen attest) is layering social commentary into her domestic fiction.
