Agnes Grey

"How wonderful it would be to become a governess! Go out into the world... earn my own livelihood... Teach the young to mature!" This is the dream of the daughter of a modest vicar, an ideal of financial and personal independence, and dedication to a noble task such as education. Once fulfilled, however, the characters in this dream reveal themselves more like nightmare monsters: brutal children, scheming and coarse young girls, grotesque fathers, petty and indulgent mothers ... and in the midst of all this the young dreamer, treated little less than a maid. Agnes Gray (1847), Anne Brontë's first novel, is a barren revelation based on autobiographical experiences of the precarious material and moral status of a Victorian governess.