Product Description

Drawing directly on her own unhappy experiences, Anne Brontë's first-person narrative describes the almost unbelievable pressures endured by nineteenth-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 Using the text of the definitive Clarendon edition, this volume also incorporates Anne Brontë's previously unpublished manuscript revisions.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #289610 in Books
• Published on: 1988-08-25
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Synopsis
When her family becomes impoverished after a disasterous financial speculation, Agnes Grey determines to find work as a governess. This is a personal perspective on the desperate position of unmarried, educated women in Victorian society.

About the Author
Edited by Robert Inglesfield, Lecturer in English, Birkbeck College, University of London, and Hilda Marsden. With a new Introduction and notes by Robert Inglesfield

Customer Reviews

Goveness in Strife
I had the pleasure of reading this book this weekend. I had come to the book expecting a poor man's version of Jane Eyre but though it is set in the life of a goveness, the story is much more subtle. It really explores what the life of a goveness what like. The descriptions of the brats that our poor protaganist is charged with the education of is spot on. (For anybody who complains about the children of today, take a look at this lot.) The isolation and the cruelties bestowed upon them. There is no dashing Rochester, no mad woman in the attic, no mystery to be solved. Just the reader and the experience. It was refreshing and heartbreaking. However, it need some ummmmph. Agnes doesn't take a stand, doesn't fight for what she wants and I found that aspect very frustrating. The romance was underplayed and folded gently throughout the narrative but I wasn't shouting 'yes!' when they united at the end. Mr Weston was a bit wet to be honest but because you like Agnes you want what she wants.
All-in-all different but not enouggh

A modest version of Jane Eyre
I cannot say I do not enjoy "Agnes Grey", but I find the plot two linear and slightly deficient in suspense. If compared to her sister's governess novel, this one is quite inferior in my opinion. Anne Brontë's talent will shine more clearly in "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall".Beautiful prose though, and satisfactory happy ending to make up for the heroine's suffering.

Simple narrative about the plight of the C19 governess
Agnes Grey suffers probably the worst critical reputation of all the Bronte sisters' novels apart from Charlotte's The Professor, though hardly any would call it a bad book.

This is a simple narrative of the trials of a poor governess, substantially based upon the author's own experiences. Apparently it is the best extant contemporary evidence we have of that occupation - the only 'respectable' occupation open to an educated woman who did not marry in the mnid C19. It expounds, somewhat pleadingly, the impossible position in which the typical governess is placed.

The narrator herself is an infuriatingly moral, religious girl. You sometimes find yourself wishing she would just lighten up a bit. Passion comes in the smallest flickers: this is a cool, detatched book.