0 Agnes Grey (1847)

At this late date it's not much surprise that Anne Bronte's first novel is the least of the three she and her elder sisters published in 1847 (with Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Emily's Wuthering Heights). It's not nearly as expansive nor as capable of achieving the heights they do. But it's still engaging and charming, the story of a governess of middle-class origins and her various adventures and sorties. The upper class is skewered as neatly and devastatingly as anything else I know, with detailed scenes of hypocrisy and deplorable behavior. Governess indeed is a particularly inspired vantage—part servant, part master, it's a position that only worked in the presence of good will all around (children excepted for the obvious reasons). It offers many interesting insights into 19th-century education, not yet taken as a state responsibility, simply by the clarity of her narrative. A year with one family and two with another supply the bulk of the action—I appreciated the panorama. Also, as I say, the unflinching reportage of the upper class, shockingly barbaric at times. One boy is mad at work continually torturing and killing small animals, which, it comes out, is the influence of a sadistic uncle who beats all his animals and loves to hunt. No one bats an eye—well, except our governess heroine, the Agnes Grey of the title—and the parents are willfully blind to much of what's going on. Thus the landed gentry. At the same time that's just one thread. There are some very nice character studies here and as usual much hope is invested in the existence of the good and noble, etc. It has a bit of a fairy tale arc, but it's also a short book. Her more ambitious The Tenant of Wildfell Hall would follow the next year and then her own death at the age of 29, the youngest of them in every way. All the Bronte sister writers died so young (Emily at 30, Charlotte at 38) it's almost sad to contemplate how good the work is that they managed to get done. There are better examples of social realism (going on naturalism) and sitting-room manners and fairy tales, but they are blended in Agnes Grey so skillfully and often so penetratingly that even with all its flaws I think it's eminently worth a look.

In case it's not at the library.

Detail: Agnes Grey (1847)

0 Wuthering Heights (1847)

I suppose I can't recommend entirely without reservation this stone classic of British literature—last time I went through turned out to be a bit of a slog. But I certainly think it's worth at least a dip for one and all. Emily Bronte's monumental first and only novel (she otherwise focused her literary energies on poetry and died at the age of 30, the year after this was published), Wuthering Heights came out the same year as her sister Charlotte's Jane Eyre and her sister Anne's Agnes Grey. I don't know Agnes Grey, but of the other two, more famous works, I think Jane Eyre is both more effective as a novel and more conventional (and it's not that conventional). Wuthering Heights is the next-best thing to full-on raving ghost/monster story, wild and howling and weird, gothic on steroids, buckled together with leather strapping and paste. Class distinctions are rendered metaphorically as stark lines between humans and beasts, and the great Byronic hero of Wuthering Heights, the remarkable Heathcliff, is of course on the wrong side of that line. Heathcliff notably has powers to compel and bend his betters to his desires, after coming to live with them originally as an orphan found on the streets of London, adopted out of the soft heart of the family patriarch. The combination of Heathcliff's ruthlessness in pursuing his ends and the family's sheltered, well-mannered naivete is the recipe for the disaster imminent from the first page. The forbidden passion between Heathcliff and the scion's daughter Catherine provides much of the dramatic tension, as Heathcliff and his will to power rise to great heights, while the rest are humiliated and torn to pieces and put into the earth one way or another, against the backdrop of gray skies and lonely barren moors. "Atmospheric" does not begin to describe it; "deranged" is closer to it in many passages. It can be a wild ride. In many ways it walks and talks and bears the trappings of the standard 19th-century novel of manners, with gentle folk gathering for fine meals and social occasions, and love interests emerging by degree. But the like of Heathcliff had never appeared in one of these before. His sheer gravitational force subverts and distorts everything around him, making a real mockery of the genteel upper class and their ways and values. It was the first time I read Wuthering Heights that I got the most out of it, taken utterly by surprise by the stunts recorded herein. I'm not sure what made the more recent reading so hard—perhaps the language, which of course is antiquated and made further eccentric with thick dialect (toned down somewhat after Emily's death by sister Charlotte in a later edition ... I can only imagine the original)—perhaps the sideways manner it crabs in and around its narrative developments. But the good news, if you haven't read it, is that you could well be in for a big treat.

In case it's not at the library.

Detail: Wuthering Heights (1847)