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Agnes Grey is a trenchant expose of the frequently isolated, intellectually stagnant and emotionally starved conditions under which many governesses worked in the mid-nineteenth century. This is a deeply personal novel written from the author's own experience and as such Agnes Grey has a power and poignancy which mark it out as a landmark work of literature dealing with the social and moral evolution of English society during the last century.

With an Introduction and Notes by Peter Merchant, Canterbury Christchurch University College

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a powerful and sometimes violent novel of expectation, love, oppression, sin, religion and betrayal. It portrays the disintegration of the marriage of Helen Huntingdon, the mysterious 'tenant' of the title, and her dissolute, alcoholic husband. Defying convention, Helen leaves her husband to protect their young son from his father's influence, and earns her own living as an artist. Whilst in hiding at Wildfell Hall, she encounters...

Anne Bronte's first novel, Agnes Grey, combines an astute dissection of middle-class social behavior 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. In writing the novel, Bronte 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...

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SAMANTHA ELLIS

Based on the author's own experience, Agnes Grey explores the position of women in Victorian society through the story of a young woman forced to work as a governess when her father is ruined financially. It is a classic not just as a result of the subtle and ironic force of Anne Bronte's prose, but also because of the passionate indictment of social injustice which animates it.

Drawing on Anne Bronte's own experiences, Agnes Grey is here presented in a new edition containing extra material and notes.

Part of Alma Classics Evergreens series, this edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte ncludes an extensive section on Anne Bronte's life and works.