Agnes Grey

Drawing on her experiences, Anne Bronte wrote her first novel out of a need to inform her contemporaries about the desperate position of unmarried, educated women driven to take up the only 'respectable' career open to them - that of a governess.

Robert Inglesfield is Senior Lecturer at the University of Warwick.
Hilda Marsden is a freelance scholar and authority on the Brontës.
Sally Shuttleworth is Head of the Humanities Division and Professor of English at the University of Oxford.