I didn't know anything about Anne Bronte before reading Agnes Grey, except that she's the overlooked Bronte sister. But by the end of the book I figured she'd worked as a governess and that it had not gone well. This book might have given her a little power. On paper, she could enjoy some mastery - trotting them out, all the wealthy vulgar fools who spoil their children and mistreat their governess (a governess who, in the book at least, earns a happy ending to make up for all the unappreciated labor and neglect).
Agnes is a clergyman's younger daughter, and when her family falls into financial straits, she offers to work as a governess. Her older sister and parents doubt her and try to discourage her. She's the baby of the family and has led a sheltered life. She romanticizes the job, imagining that it involves a lot of gentle teaching and chiding and comforting.
In the first family she works for, she gets a bunch of unmanageable brats dumped on her. The parents offer her no support and blame her for the children's faults, so she's helpless in dealing with them. The second family that hires her gives her teenaged daughters to work with. There's little she can do to teach them. Outside the schoolroom, they sometimes spend time with her when they're out of other options. Otherwise, they ignore her. Neglect, loneliness, invisibility - Bronte writes these feelings confidently. The only upside to Agnes being ignored is that she enjoys a few opportunities to spend time with a local curate. She falls in love with him, and he's actually a decent man. (No Heathcliff here.)
The book suffers from some flat characterizations and lack of subtlety. Callous coquetry leads to misery, the rich are often poor role models, parents can be clueless about children's education, some clergy aren't properly Christian, and the meek shall inherit some happy corner of the earth - virtue eventually gets rewarded after suffering and tests of forbearance. Sometimes the book reads as if Bronte is sticking pins into voodoo dolls of her former employers and their brats.
But she understands powerlessness. She knows what it is to be miserable and forgotten, to have so much in you to share and no one to share it with. To feel yourself fading and hollowing out. And to want, to want something or someone badly, when so much is out of your control. When Agnes falls in love with Edward, what keeps them apart until the end aren't character defects but the fact that he's a poor curate, and she's a governess, and they can have a conversation now and then by pretending to bump into each other on a lane, but that's about it. Agnes struggles to be patient and resigned, while afraid that her one chance for happiness is slipping.
(This one was on my Classics Club list.)
