Written when womenтАФand workers generallyтАФhad 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 governessтАФ"beneath" her employers but "above" their servantsтАФcondemns her to a life of loneliness.
Less celebrated than her older sisters, Charlotte and Emily, Anne Bront├л was also less interested in spinning wildly symbolic, romantic tales and more determined to draw realistic images of conditions in Victorian England that needed changing. While Charlotte's Jane Eyre features a governess who eventually and improbably marries her employer, Agnes Grey deals with the actual experiences of middle-class working women, experiences Anne had herself endured during her hateful tenure as a governess.
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