Agnes Grey

Agnes Grey was Anne Brontë’s first novel, written in 1847 when the author was only 26, the same year as her sister Emily wrote her only novel Wuthering Heights and her more prolific sister Charlotte wrote her second novel Jane Eyre which has a similar theme to Agnes Grey. The novel is written in first person of the central character, Agnes Grey. The novel did not sell as well as her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, although it did earn her praise from the Irish novelist George Moore as being “the most perfect prose narrative in English”.

The plot is based around Agnes Grey who becomes a governess (teacher of young, wealthy, children) after her family is faced with financial ruin. She works for two families, the Murrays and the Bloomfields, where she observes the negative effect of wealth on social values as she deals with their spoilt and undisciplined children.

An underlying theme of the book is the place of women in Victorian society. The job of governess was one of the few available career paths for women at the time, and one which Anne herself had experienced working first for the Ingham family in 1839 then for the Robinsons in 1840 until she left the profession in 1845. Agnes Grey’s eventual ability to open a small school with only her mother (her father, a minister, died before this), as well as her finding a man who loves her and who has ideal qualities of being perceptive, gentle and charitable, show the early feminist leanings of the book as well as showing both the growing, but nevertheless extremely backward, position of women in Victorian England. Some have, however, criticized the novel on feminist grounds as Agnes fails to put up any resistance to the unreasonable expectations of the families that employ her.