In the Library
Agnes Grey
Anne Brontë, 1847
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 25
- Length
- Length 68k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
The human heart is like india-rubber; a little swells it, but a great deal will not burst it.
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- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Anne Brontë
Anne Brontë's other novel does the same unflinching work at full volume, a woman who bolts from her husband and sets down exactly what he did.
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Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë
Jane Eyre is the same job in a colder house, but Charlotte gives her governess a fire, a secret and a fortune where Anne gives Agnes only patience.
£1.99
The Turn of the Screw
Henry James
James's governess arrives at a country house as alone and unprotected as Agnes, though the children she cannot manage may be haunted by something worse than bad manners.
£1.99
About the book
A boy stands over a nest of unfledged birds, cheerfully listing the torments he has planned for them, and his governess, who has no authority in that house and knows it, fetches a flat stone and kills them herself. Anne Brontë had been a governess, and Agnes Grey is what she brought back from it: a poor clergyman's daughter who goes out gladly to earn her own keep and learns that a governess is answerable to everyone in the house, obeyed by nobody, and blamed for the manners of children she is given no power to correct. There is no madwoman here, no moor, no storm on the heath. There is only a young woman counting the small daily humiliations, holding her temper, and watching a curate who strokes the cat the rector kicked. You will not know how badly you want her to be happy until she is standing at the edge of the sea.