Calgary Public Library

Agnes grey, Anne Bront©±

eng

technical information on music

Agnes grey

electronic resource.

Anne Bront©±

Drawing directly on her own experiences, Anne Bronte describes the isolation and dark ambiguity of the governess's life as lived by her fictional heroine Agnes Grey.Written when women—and workers generally—had few rights in England, Agnes Grey exposes the brutal inequities of the rigid class system in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. Agnes comes from a respectable middle-class family, but their financial reverses have forced her to seek work as a governess. Pampered and protected at home, she is unprepared for the harsh reality of a governess's life. At the Bloomfields and, later, the Murrays, she suffers under the snobbery and sadism of the selfish, self-indulgent upper-class adults and the shrieking insolence of their spoiled children. Worse, the unique social and economic position of a governess—"beneath" her employers but "above" their servants—condemns her to a life of loneliness.Less celebrated than her older sisters, Charlotte and..