SOURCE: "The Brontës and Their Betters," in The Brontës and Their Background: Romance and Reality, Macmillan, 1973, pp. 160-94.

In the following excerpt, Winnifrith discusses Brontë's harsh portrayal of Victorian aristocracy in Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

We do not know a great deal about the life of Anne, and it is perhaps too easy to represent Agnes Grey as straight autobiography with the Inghams of Blake Hall portrayed by the Bloomfields of Wellwood House and the Murrays of Horton Lodge standing for the Robinsons of Thorp Green. Anne's experiences with the children of the two households may be accurately mirrored in her account of the fiendish young Bloomfields and frivolous young Murrays. But the Inghams, coming from a well-established Yorkshire family, were unlike Mr Birdwood, a retired tradesman who had realised a considerable for-tune; Blake Hall was not a new house, surrounded...