“Looking Yonderly”: Mary Taylor’s Miss Miles or a Tale of Yorkshire Life 60 Years Ago (1890)

Abstract

Undoubtedly influenced by Mary Taylor’s letters to her sister, Charlotte Brontë, after in 1845 Taylor emigrated to Port Nicholson, the original settlement of Wellington, Anne Brontë deploys New Zealand as a metaphor of unbridgeable distance and savagery in her novel, Agnes Grey (1847), describing her character feeling utterly cut off from everything familiar when she becomes a governess 70 miles from home. Brontë’s heroine represents the trip to her new residence as analogous with the romance of journeying as far from Yorkshire as it was possible to travel—to the southern hemisphere: “I awoke next morning; feeling like one whirled away by enchantment, and suddenly dropped from the clouds into a remote and unknown land, widely and completely isolated from all he had ever seen or known before” (68). Magically shrinking time while expanding space, and drawing directly on the descriptions of isolation and feelings that Taylor recorded in letters to Charlotte Brontë, Anne Brontë also notes her heroine’s “strange feeling of desolation, mingled with a strong sense of the novelty of my situation, and a joyless kind of curiosity concerning what was yet unknown” (110). Not having traveled half as far to work as a governess, Anne Brontë suggests that distance is relative, and that her character shares the alienation overwhelming the emigrant in the rough Victorian colony.

No one that has not lived such a retired, stationary life as mine, can possibly imagine what they were: hardly even if he has known what it is to awake some morning, and find himself in Port Nicholson, in New Zealand, with a world of waters between himself and all that knew him. (Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey 68)