Agnes Grey (Penguin Classics)

by Anne Brontë (Author), Angeline Goreau (Editor), Angeline Goreau (Introduction), Anne Brontë (Author), Anne Brontë (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1988

  $3.34

  When her family becomes impoverished after a disastrous financial speculation, Agnes Grey determines to find work as a governess in order to contribute to their meagre income and assert her independence. But Agnes's enthusiasm is swiftly extinguished as she struggles first with the unmanageable Bloomfield children and then with the painful disdain of the haughty Murray family; the only kindness she receives comes from Mr Weston, the sober young curate. Drawing on her own experience, Anne Bronte's first novel offers a compelling personal perspective on the desperate position of unmarried, educated women for whom becoming a governess was the only respectable career open in Victorian society.

• Used

  Paperback
  1991

  $3.73

  Drawing directly on her own unhappy experiences, Anne Bronte's first-person narrative describes the almost unbelievable pressures endured by 19th-century governesses - the isolation, the frustration, and the insensitive and sometimes cruel treatment meted out by employers and their families. Distinguished by its sharp, often ironic observation of middle-class social behaviour, this deeply personal novel also touches on religious belief, moral responsibility, and individual integrity and its survival. Using the text of the definitive Clarendon edition, this volume also incorporates Anne Bronte's previously unpublished manuscript revisions.

• New

  Paperback
  1994

  $6.84

  Agnes Grey is a trenchant expose of the frequently isolated, intellectually stagnant and emotionally starved conditions under which many governesses worked in the mid-nineteenth century. This is a deeply personal novel written from the author's own experience and as such Agnes Grey has a power and poignancy which mark it out as a landmark work of literature dealing with the social and moral evolution of English society during the last century.