Agnes Grey

by Anne Brontë

Agnes Grey is an autobiographical novel which recounts the experience of a young governess born of a financially-ruined clergyman. During England's Victorian period, there wasn't much else for a respectable and intelligent young woman to do: you were either wealthy and had governesses to care for your children, or you were, well, a governess yourself. Such was Anne's life, and the life of her protagonist. Agnes goes to work for two families, the Bloomfields and the Murrays, who are not so much t...