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Rating: Anne Brontë, among the three writer sisters, was the one who achieved the least success. She wrote and published in 1847, under the pseudonym Acton Bell and concurrently with the release of her sisters' novels, Emily and Charlotte, her debut work "Agnes Grey".
The story of "Agnes Grey" roughly mirrors the theme of Jane Eyre: it tells of a young governess who faces her parents' bankruptcy and decides to become a governess to help them financially. She first ends up with the terrible Bloomfield family, whose children are little delinquents, and then with the Murrays, a slightly more acceptable family. There, she meets a modest Anglican pastor who loves her for who she is and who will help her open a small school with Agnes's mother.
Aside from being tied to the genre of the novel of manners, that genre of novel imbued with certain late romanticism typical of the early Victorian age, some critics have aptly defined Agnes Grey as a coming-of-age novel, in which the protagonist undergoes a certain transformation in the course of the narrated events, both psychologically and temporally. The main character described here is intelligent but rendered naive as a victim of circumstances, full of initiatives yet powerless because bound to the inevitable succession of events. The theme of education is treated with wit, along with (female) emancipation and isolation, in a sharp analysis of the (almost always) depressing life of a governess of the time.
While this short novel is well-written, it lacks a certain fluidity. The plot is rather weak and not very intricate, making the narrative effect quite flat. Agnes Grey is at times a boring book, lacking a certain liveliness typical of early 19th-century novel of manners. The comparison with her sisters is more than spontaneous and it doesn't take much, just a few pages, to understand that the talent went entirely to the older sisters.
A little better is the second and last novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, considered scandalous at the time because it addressed a controversial theme for the Victorian age: the escape of a dissatisfied wife who decides to leave her husband. However, it is not a gem either.
The more popular of the two remains "Agnes Grey", a sort of autobiographical diary transposed into a novel, a book that, all in all, is not exceptional and perhaps lacks a certain literary maturity although the potential is there: but Anne Brontë will never have time to reach maturity, due to her untimely death from tuberculosis at the age of just 29.
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