"It seemed as if they looked on vacancy": Life Writing in Agnes Grey

This essay reads Anne Brontë's first novel through the lens of life-writing, moving beyond restrictive notions of the autobiographical to encompass a range of narrative strategies deployed by authors exploring selfhood and subjectivity. Agnes Grey reveals Brontë's relatively sophisticated understanding of different dimensions of identity, both her own and that of her eponymous heroine. Brontë explores personhood in order to encourage readers to consider the ways humans come to be understood and treated as persons, and the situations that cause persons to think of themselves as fundamentally human. Further, she deploys a range of rhetorical tools and narrative techniques that foreground the intersubjective nature of her heroine's self-understanding and the dynamics of her interiority, complicating in the process any superficial understanding of the character as quiet and, in turn, unsettling the impression that biographers of Anne Brontë, beginning most influentially with her sister Charlotte, have perpetuated.