unquiet earth; I could almost hear them demanding why I had left them alone for so long. I stared at Agnes Grey and I began to remember things I wished I could forget: the madwoman in the attic, Grace Poole, the parsonage fire, Thorp Green. Yes, yes, Thorp Green. Hell, I hadn’t thought of that place in years.
I pulled out my phone for the second time that evening. Blanche Howard had warned me that discussing my inheritance was a matter of great urgency, but I hadn’t anticipated that a book would appear at my doorstep if I didn’t act fast enough. I had no other choice: it was time to arrange a meeting with the British National Bank.
CHAPTER 4
A gnes Grey is, without question, the most boring book ever written. It tells the story of an impossibly meek nineteenth-century governess (Agnes) who describes what it is like being an impossibly meek nineteenth-century governess for over two hundred pages. The plot is famously dull—a badly disguised autobiography of Anne Brontë’s own less-than-riveting early twenties. Agnes, the daughter of respectable yet poor parents, becomes a governess at a manor suspiciously similar to the one where Anne Brontë herself worked. There, Agnes meets a slew of well-dressed villains: materialistic, frivolous, and rife with satirical potential. But Agnes—and by association, Anne—never offers the sort of biting social commentary that would have upgraded Agnes Grey to Pride and Prejudice . Reading the book leaves only a sense of gasping emptiness, and the disappointing feeling that Anne Brontë missed her opportunity to be truly great. The novel is about a woman who isn’t allowed to speak her mind, and was written by a woman who also wasn’t allowed to speak her mind. It was handcuffed right from the get-go.
Critics at the time found little fault with it. Agnes was everything a young lady ought to be: moral, weak, waify. Unlike the other Brontë novels, Agnes Grey met with relatively little contempt. “It is infinitely more agreeable” than Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights , read one review, leaving “no painful impression on the mind—some may think no impression at all.” Poor Anne. I used to fancy myself as something of her reincarnation, caught in the similarly oppressive shadow of older, illustrious writers. “A queer little thing” was what Charlotte called her youngest sister. George Smith, the Brontës’ publisher, called Anne a “gentle, quiet, rather subdued person.” Her manner, he said, was “curiously expressive of a wish for protection and encouragement, a kind of constant appeal which invited sympathy.”
I was eight or nine when my father first sat me down with Agnes Grey. Dad viewed the Brontë books as private diaries the rest of the world didn’t understand. We started with Agnes Grey because it was the most “coded” of the Brontë novels, as he put it. Then we moved onto Wuthering Heights because it was the most “literal,” and after that came Jane Eyre because it was the most “unfair.” Then, and only then, my father said, would we take a look at The Tenant of Wildfell Hall because understanding it required first reading the other three. Are you ready? he used to ask me. Are you ready for them? My father wasn’t a certified teacher and he didn’t have much of a syllabus. He himself never received a college degree, which I assumed was out of genuine disinterest—Dad loathed modern education and its feel-good teaching methods. In his mind, all teachers should use a combination of the Socratic method and basic training. He did try to create some semblance of a classroom, however. We used the rectangular kitchen table as our desk, a baguette as our pointer. If I received less than eighty-five percent on any of his oral examinations, he made me go outside and play soccer.
Under Dad’s philosophy, books were not shape-shifting constructions of a reader’s imagination. Novels, he said, offered the specific clues, maps, and guidelines
I pulled out my phone for the second time that evening. Blanche Howard had warned me that discussing my inheritance was a matter of great urgency, but I hadn’t anticipated that a book would appear at my doorstep if I didn’t act fast enough. I had no other choice: it was time to arrange a meeting with the British National Bank.
CHAPTER 4
A gnes Grey is, without question, the most boring book ever written. It tells the story of an impossibly meek nineteenth-century governess (Agnes) who describes what it is like being an impossibly meek nineteenth-century governess for over two hundred pages. The plot is famously dull—a badly disguised autobiography of Anne Brontë’s own less-than-riveting early twenties. Agnes, the daughter of respectable yet poor parents, becomes a governess at a manor suspiciously similar to the one where Anne Brontë herself worked. There, Agnes meets a slew of well-dressed villains: materialistic, frivolous, and rife with satirical potential. But Agnes—and by association, Anne—never offers the sort of biting social commentary that would have upgraded Agnes Grey to Pride and Prejudice . Reading the book leaves only a sense of gasping emptiness, and the disappointing feeling that Anne Brontë missed her opportunity to be truly great. The novel is about a woman who isn’t allowed to speak her mind, and was written by a woman who also wasn’t allowed to speak her mind. It was handcuffed right from the get-go.
Critics at the time found little fault with it. Agnes was everything a young lady ought to be: moral, weak, waify. Unlike the other Brontë novels, Agnes Grey met with relatively little contempt. “It is infinitely more agreeable” than Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights , read one review, leaving “no painful impression on the mind—some may think no impression at all.” Poor Anne. I used to fancy myself as something of her reincarnation, caught in the similarly oppressive shadow of older, illustrious writers. “A queer little thing” was what Charlotte called her youngest sister. George Smith, the Brontës’ publisher, called Anne a “gentle, quiet, rather subdued person.” Her manner, he said, was “curiously expressive of a wish for protection and encouragement, a kind of constant appeal which invited sympathy.”
I was eight or nine when my father first sat me down with Agnes Grey. Dad viewed the Brontë books as private diaries the rest of the world didn’t understand. We started with Agnes Grey because it was the most “coded” of the Brontë novels, as he put it. Then we moved onto Wuthering Heights because it was the most “literal,” and after that came Jane Eyre because it was the most “unfair.” Then, and only then, my father said, would we take a look at The Tenant of Wildfell Hall because understanding it required first reading the other three. Are you ready? he used to ask me. Are you ready for them? My father wasn’t a certified teacher and he didn’t have much of a syllabus. He himself never received a college degree, which I assumed was out of genuine disinterest—Dad loathed modern education and its feel-good teaching methods. In his mind, all teachers should use a combination of the Socratic method and basic training. He did try to create some semblance of a classroom, however. We used the rectangular kitchen table as our desk, a baguette as our pointer. If I received less than eighty-five percent on any of his oral examinations, he made me go outside and play soccer.
Under Dad’s philosophy, books were not shape-shifting constructions of a reader’s imagination. Novels, he said, offered the specific clues, maps, and guidelines
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