SOURCE: "The Gentle Anne," in Brontë Society Transactions, Vol. 16, No. 1, 1971, pp. 1-10.

In the following excerpt, Schofield examines the gentle humor of Agnes Grey and the novel's sources in Brontë's own life.

May Sinclair has written: "There is in the smallest of the Brontës an immense, a terrifying, audacity. Charlotte was bold and Emily was bolder; but this audacity of Anne's was greater … because it was willed, it was deliberate, open-eyed. Anne took her courage in both her hands when she sat down to write The Tenant of Wildfell Hall."¹ She did, and she never flinched from the consequences flung at her by her critics.

All the same, Agnes Grey is an infinitely better book because it falls within the natural range of Anne's literary capacity. It is her own story, unadorned, direct, beautifully told, perfectly visualised—the classic "documentary" as we might say of a...