Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte

I know so many people absolutely love Anne Bronte and Agnes Grey in particular, but sadly I am not one of them. I am a fan of Victorian literature and have been reading Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights for decades, but I was bored by Tenant of Wildfell Hall and annoyed by Agnes Grey.

Here is what I didn't like about Agnes Grey.

I found the first-person narrator to be sanctimonious and self-righteous without a spark of humor. I always assumed poor Agnes to be forced to become a governess, but this was entirely her choice. Yes, her father risked and lost their meager family funds and they were strapped financially, but her parents and sister repeatedly told her she needn't go off and be a governess since they could see she wasn't well-suited to it. But, she spent years miserable, lonely, and bitter about the thankless job. She was very snarky and judgmental about the children she was employed to teach and their parents, and I have to believe that she set herself up to be marginalized. I know I am not being fair, but the constant sniping by Agnes got on my nerves.

Anne Bronte didn't tell a very compelling story. The characters were either good or bad--that is, Agnes and her parents and sister and Mr. Weston, the curate she falls in love with, were all good, and the children and parents and their friends were uniformly bad. No shades of gray, no backstory to explain the manifold flaws of the gentry Agnes forced herself to work for, and definitely no growth. I was hopeful that Miss Rosalie would show some growth after she came back into Agnes's life as a married woman who regretted marrying for money alone, but no, she was still selfish and deceitful. And the main character showed absolutely no growth or development or enlightenment in the course of the story. She had no personal hills to climb, she had only to endure being around people she didn't like and who didn't like her.

So the plot was non-existent, the characters were cardboard, and the tone was supercilious. Why then did I give it three stars on GoodReads? Good question--I think I was swayed by the lovely description Bronte gave of the sea coast where Agnes and her mother go to live at the end of the book. I am always a sucker for good nature writing, and this stole my heart and made me want to return to the Yorkshire coast again.

Not the best classic to begin my Back to the Classics 2019 challenge, but now I have a check mark next to Classic by a Woman Author category.

The Taste of Sorrow (A novel of the Brontës) - a must-read!

Patrick Brontë, father of Charlotte, Emily, Anne, et al, remembered his Irish father working in fields, so poor that he had to suck on a pebble to keep his mouth from going dry..."That is the taste of sorrows: the hard necessary pebble in your mouth."

The whole of The Taste of Sorrow (aka Charlotte & Emily in the U.S.) by Jude Morgan is like that.  Poetic, layered, and somber, until the sun breaks in at the end with Charlotte's marriage to Arthur Bell Nicholls, her father's curate and fellow Irishman.  Despite Charlotte dying less than a year after she was married, I was so happy that the poor woman finally tasted something other than the sorrow that weighted her down for most of her life.

The Taste of Sorrow is not just the best book I've read this year, it's one of the best books I've ever read.  I'm a fan of both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, as well as Elizabeth Gaskell's fabulous The Life of Charlotte Brontë, and know well the story of the talented by doomed Brontë family.  The mother from Cornwall who died an agonizing early death, leaving five young daughters and one young son.  The Old Testament father whose eccentricities both nourished and starved his children, both mentally and physically. The deaths of the two oldest girls at a school that Charlotte Brontë would immortalize and condemn for the ages as Lowood School in Jane Eyre.  The childhoods of the four remaining children who escaped into fantasy worlds that they documented in miniature books.  The drunken debauchery of the golden boy, Branwell.  The silent stoicism of the reclusive Emily.  The determination of shy Anne.  And the grit, gumption, and sheer chutzpah of Charlotte.

Morgan's book doesn't really reveal anything I hadn't already read in bios about the Brontës, but his writing makes the story new and fresh and heart-breaking all over again.  My copy has an endorsement by Hilary Mantel on the cover, which is appropriate because The Taste of Sorrow really reminded me a lot of Wolf Hall.  Mostly in present tense, often stream-of-consciousness, but not in a hard-to-understand way, and frequent use of free indirect discourse.  I loved how in a single paragraph, Morgan could convey the four points of view of Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne, enabling the reader to feel the tension and alliances and baggage between the four.

My favorite part was when Charlotte, Emily, and Anne were working on their first three novels, and would write at night in the dining room.  Pacing around the table, reading aloud, rewriting...the three weird sisters, concocting their literary magic.  I also really enjoyed hearing about Charlotte's first meeting with Elizabeth Gaskell and their friendship.

I didn't intend to finish the novel and post about it on Charlotte's birthday, so imagine my delight when I realized that Charlotte Brontë was born 198 years ago today, April 21!

Final note - here is a great blog post entitled The Secret Life of Jude Morgan.  Like the blogger who wrote this piece, I struggle with understanding Morgan's lack of notoriety.  His historical fiction is some of the very best around.  Here's my review of Passion, his novel about the Romantic poets and their women.

The Taste of Sorrow is one of my books on my 2014 Historical Fiction Challenge and the 2014 TBR Pile Challenge.