* * * * *

No. Of these tragic Brontës the most tragic, the most pitiful, the most
mercilessly abused by destiny, was Anne. An interminable, monstrous
exile is the impression we get of Anne's life in the years of her
girlhood. There is no actual record of them. Nobody kept Anne's letters.
We never hear her sad voice raised in self-pity or revolt. It is
doubtful if she ever raised it. She waited in silence and resignation,
and then told her own story in _Agnes Grey_. But her figure remains dim
in her own story and in the classic "Lives". We only know that she was
the youngest, and that, unlike her sisters, she was pretty. She had
thick brown curling hair, and violet-blue eyes, and delicate dark
eyebrows, and a skin rose and white for her sisters' sallow, that must
have given some ominous hint of fever. This delicate thing was broken on
the wheel of life. They say of Anne perpetually that she was "gentle".
In Charlotte's sketch of her she holds her pretty head high, her eyes
gaze straight forward, and you wonder whether, before the breaking
point, she was always as gentle as they say. But you never see her in
any moment of revolt. Her simple poems, at their bitterest, express no
more than a frail agony, an innocent dismay. That little raising of the
head in conscious rectitude is all that breaks the long plaint of _Agnes
Grey_.

There is no piety in that plaint. It is purely pagan; the cry of youth
cheated of its desire. Life brought her no good gifts beyond the slender
ineffectual beauty that left her undesired. Her tremulous, expectant
womanhood was cheated. She never saw so much as the flying veil of joy,
or even of such pale, uninspired happiness as she dreamed in _Agnes
Grey_. She was cheated of her innocent dream.