Agnes Grey

by Anne Brontë, Robert Inglesfield (Editor), Hilda Marsden (Editor), Sally Shuttleworth

Overview

''How delightful it would be to be a governess!''When the young Agnes Grey takes up her first post as governess she is full of hope; she believes she only has to remember ''myself at their age'' to win her pupils'' love and trust. Instead she finds the young children she has to deal with completely unmanageable. They are, as she observes to her mother, ''unimpressible, incomprehensible creatures''. In writing her first novel, Anne Brontë drew on her own experiences, and one can trace in the work many of the trials of the Victorian governess, often stranded far from home, and treated with little respect by her employers, yet expected to control and educate her young charges. Agnes Grey looks at childhood from nursery to adolescence, and it also charts the frustrations of romantic love, as Agnes starts to nurse warmer feelings towards the local curate, Mr Weston.The novel combines astute dissection of middle-class social behaviour and class attitudes with a wonderful study of Victorian responses to young children which has parallels with debates about education that continue to this day. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World''s Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford''s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199296989
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	07/01/2010
Series:	Oxford World's Classics Series
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.60(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	12 - 18 Years

About the Author

Robert Inglesfield is Senior Lecturer at the University of Warwick.
Hilda Marsden is a freelance scholar and authority on the Brontës.
Sally Shuttleworth is Head of the Humanities Division and Professor of English at the University of Oxford.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Anne Brontë: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text

Agnes Grey

Appendix A: Other Writings by and about Anne Brontë

• 1. From Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey (letter, 15 April 1839)
• 2. From Anne Brontë, Diary Paper (30 July 1841)
• 3. From Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey (letter, 7 August 1841)
• 4. From Anne Brontë, Diary Paper (31 July 1845)
• 5. Anne Brontë, “The Bluebell” (22 August 1840)
• 6. Acton Bell [Anne Brontë], “Appeal” (28 August 1840)
• 7. Anne Brontë, “Lines Written at [Thorp] Green” (19 August 1841)
• 8. Acton Bell [Anne Brontë], “Lines Composed in a Wood on a Windy Day” (30 December 1842)
• 9. From Ellen Nussey, “Reminiscences of Charlotte Brontë” (1871)
• 10. From Currer Bell [Charlotte Brontë], “Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell” (1850)

Appendix B: Contemporary and Early Reviews and Responses

• 1. From Spectator (18 December 1847)
• 2. From Henry F. Chorley, Athenaeum (25 December 1847)
• 3. From Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper (15 January 1848)
• 4. From New Monthly Magazine (January 1848)
• 5. From Atlas (22 January 1848)
• 6. From Portland [Maine] Transcript (5 January 1850)
• 7. From Graham’s Magazine [Philadelphia] (1 February 1850)
• 8. From W.C. Roscoe, “Miss Brontë,” National Review (July 1857)
• 9. From Mary Augusta Ward, “Introduction,” The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1900)
• 10. From George Moore, Conversations in Ebury Street (1910)

Appendix C: The Governess in Society

• 1. Maria Smith Abdy, “A Governess Wanted,” Metropolitan Magazine (May 1836)
• 2. From George Stephen, The Guide to Service: The Governess (1844)
• 3. From “Hints on the Modern Governess System,” Fraser’s Magazine (November 1844)

Appendix D: Humane Treatment of Animals

• 1. From Isaac Watts, A Discourse on the Education of Children and Youth (1725)
• 2. From Thomas Erskine, Speech … On … Preventing … Cruelty to Animals (1809)
• 3. From “Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals,” Times (17 June 1824)
• 4. From Sarah Burdett, The Rights of Animals (1839)
• 5. From Charlotte Elizabeth [Tonna], Kindness to Animals (c. 1845)
• 6. C.S., “The Lost Nestlings,” A Mother’s Lessons in Kindness to Animals (c. 1862)

Works Cited and Select Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

"Agnes Grey is the most perfect prose narrative of English letters . . . Simple and beautiful . . . The only story in English literature in which style, characters, and subject are in perfect keeping." —George Moore

"For too long [Anne] has been undervalued as the third-best Bronte. 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

"Brontë depicts in detail the isolation inherent in a governess's life, as an educated – but by necessity not too educated – woman trapped in an awkward halfway world between the classes." —Guardian

From the Publisher