Agnes Grey

Anne Brontë

март 2012 г. · Courier Corporation

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In her daring first novel, the youngest Brontë sister drew upon her own experiences to tell the unvarnished truth about life as a governess. Like Agnes Grey, Anne Brontë was a young middle-class Victorian lady whose family fortunes had faltered. Like so many other unmarried women of the nineteenth century, Brontë accepted the only "respectable" employment available — and entered a world of hardship, humiliation, and loneliness.
Written with a realism that shocked critics, this biting social commentary offers a sympathetic portrait of Agnes and a moving indictment of her brutish and haughty employers. Separated from her family and friends by many miles, paid little more than subsistence wages, Agnes stands alone — both in society at large and in a household where she is neither family member nor servant. Agnes Grey remains a landmark in the literature of social history. In addition to its challenge to the era's chauvinism and materialism, it features a first-person narrative that offers a rare opportunity to hear the voice of a Victorian working woman.

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Anne Bronte was the daughter of an impoverished clergyman of Haworth in Yorkshire, England. Considered by many critics as the least talented of the Bronte sisters, Anne wrote two novels. Agnes Grey (1847) is the story of a governess, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), is a tale of the evils of drink and profligacy. Her acquaintance with the sin and wickedness shown in her novels was so astounding that Charlotte Bronte saw fit to explain in a preface that the source of her sister's knowledge of evil was their brother Branwell's dissolute ways. A habitue of drink and drugs, he finally became an addict. Anne Bronte's other notable work is her Complete Poems. Anne Bronte died in 1849.