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Agnes Grey

Name: Agnes Grey
Author: Anne Brontë
ISBN: 9781848376083

by Anne Brontë

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Overview

Concerned for her family's financial welfare and eager to expand her own horizons, Agnes Grey takes up the position of governess, the only respectable employment for an unmarried woman in the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, Agnes cannot anticipate the hardship, humiliation, and loneliness that await her in the brutish Bloomfield and haughty Murray households. Drawn from Anne Bronte's own experiences, Agnes Grey depicts the harsh conditions and class snobbery that governesses were often forced to endure. As Barbara A. Suess writes in her Introduction, "Bronte provides a portrait of the governess that is as sympathetic as her fictional indictment of the shallow, selfish moneyed class is biting."

Synopsis

Drawing directly on her own experiences, Anne Brontë describes the isolation and dark ambiguity of the governess's life as lived by her fictional heroine Agnes Grey. Mature, insightful, and edged with a quiet irony, this first novel by the youngest of the Brontës displays her keen sense of moral responsibility and sharp eye for bourgeois attitudes and behavior.

About the Author, Anne Brontë

Barbara A. Suess, assistant professor of English at William Patterson University, is the co-editor of New Approaches to the Literary Art of Anne Brontë and the author of Progress and Identity in the Plays of W. B. Yeats, 1892–1907.