SOURCE: "Acton Bell," in Anne Brontë, revised ed., Allen Lane, 1976, pp. 209-34.

In the following excerpt, originally published in 1959, Gérin summarizes the facts of Brontë's composition of Agnes Grey and the early critical reception of the novel.

Anne Brontë's own copy of Agnes Grey (it was a compact volume of 363 pages), which is preserved in Princeton University Library, is full of the author's corrections of … numerous errors.¹ One can imagine her sitting, with bowed head, the light of the lamp falling on her pretty hair, absorbed in her task. Agnes Grey was published in one volume; it had not the breadth to take up two like Emily's Wuthering Heights, far less three, like Charlotte's Jane Eyre. Yet it held in its modest dimensions a perfection of its own.

"Agnes Grey," wrote Charlotte a week after the book had come out, "is the mirror of the...