Agnes Grey

Drawing on her own experience, Anne Brontë exposes the isolated world of a nineteenth-century governess in her debut novel, Agnes Grey.

Complete & Unabridged. Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is introduced by historian and biographer, Juliet Barker.

Agnes Grey is the youngest daughter of a clergyman. When the family falls on hard times, she insists on finding work as a governess in order to help her family and prove to them that she’s no longer a child. But her idealistic spirit is tested in her first position with the Bloomfield family and their unruly and spoilt children. Next she works for the even wealthier Murray family, whose scheming daughter Rosalie threatens to jeopardize the only bright spot in Agnes’s life: the young curate Edward Weston.

Review

The most perfect prose narrative in English letters -- George Moore

Anne provided her heroine with a hero who was actually nice to women. This still feels revolutionary ― Guardian

A compelling Victorian take on the iniquities of the wealth gap ― Telegraph

For too long [Anne] has been undervalued as the third-best Brontë. But her fiction, exploring the lamentably still-current themes of addiction and domestic violence and the abuse of vulnerable women working away from home, has a vigour and bracing satirical intelligence which places her in the first rank of what is arguably the greatest ever generation of novelists in English -- Lucy Hughes-Hallett

About the Author

Anne Brontë was born in Yorkshire in 1820. She was the youngest of six children and the sister of fellow novelists Charlotte and Emily, the authors of Jane Eyreand Wuthering Heights respectively. Her mother died when she was a baby and she was raised by her aunt and her father, The Reverend Patrick Brontë. Anne worked as a governess before returning to Haworth where she and her sisters published poems under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. She published her first novel, Agnes Grey in 1847 and this was followed by The Tenant of Wildfell Hallin 1848. She died from tuberculosis in 1849