Agnes Grey

In her daring first novel, the youngest Bronte sister drew upon her own experiences to tell the unvarnished truth about life as a governess. Like Agnes Grey, Anne Bronte was a young middle-class Victorian lady whose family fortunes had faltered. Like so many other unmarried women of the nineteenth century, Bronte accepted the only "respectable" employment available--and entered a world of hardship, humiliation, and loneliness.