Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey (1847) is about many things: chief among them is kindness. In this short novel, the words ‘kind’ and ‘kindness’ appear over 50 times. In the course of the work, we are brought to see that kindness is not a weak flame over which the downtrodden can warm their hands a little but rather a bonfire of a life force, the source of social good, and between Agnes Grey and Edward Weston, mutual kindness—specifically the shared valuing of kindness itself—ignites eros. As Marianne Thormӓhlen rightly observed, ‘Agnes Grey’s falling in love with Mr Weston is erotically charged in ways which present-day readers easily overlook’. I want to argue that this erotic charge is an intensification of currents of feeling that characterise Agnes’s whole narrative. The way Agnes describes, late in the novel, the pressure of her lover’s hand could also describe her experiences of kindness, both given and received, throughout her life: ‘emphatic, yet gentle’.