This week I have been re-reading Agnes Gray by Ann Bronte.
I had forgotten how comical it gets in places.
Quite suprising when you think it was written around 1840 something.
I looked up the Brontes, wondering how closely their own lives mirror their stories and discovered that Ann died aged only 29.
All the children in that family died before they were 40 and there were 6 to begin with.
Only one of the 5 sisters ever married .
They were mostly kept at home except for a couple of stints in boarding schools.
The first school managed to kill the two older girls when they were 11 and 10 by neglecting them until they had caught TB.
As far as their stories go, they seem far more romantic and exciting than the girl's actual real lives.
Novels were often seen as unsavoury reading for girls back in those days and I wonder if it was because they might be seen to give girls ideas of actually being able to choose to marry for something other than position in life and even heaven forbid, not marry at all but actually pursue their own interests.
I cant help but feel a little pang of regret for some of the lost simplicity of life but I don't supppose, had I been around in those days,that I would have turned down the chance to let machinery do the drudge jobs.
Rich people back then, would have employed servants to do them so maybe we are not so very different, just a lot richer overall.
I Victorian ladies could jump to us through time, I wonder what they would make of their modern contempories
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