Agnes Grey looks at childhood from nursery to adolescence, and it also charts the frustrations of romantic love, as Agnes starts to nurse warmer feelings towards the local curate, Mr Weston. In writing her first novel, Anne Brontë 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. They are, as she observes to her mother, 'unimpressible, incomprehensible creatures'. Instead she finds the young children she has to deal with completely unmanageable. When the young Agnes Grey takes up her first post as governess she is full of hope she believes she only has to remember 'myself at their age' to win her pupils' love and trust. 'How delightful it would be to be a governess!' Authoritative Clarendon text retained and reset.Revised and updated Select Bibliography.
Critically up-to-date introduction by Sally Shuttleworth.Retains the authoritative Clarendon text in new setting.Revised notes drawing on the latest critical material.Sally Shuttleworth brings to bear her in-depth knowledge of the Haworth context and childhood in nineteenth-century literature, medicine, and science, and looks at the representation of childhood cruelty in the novel, as well as the novel's portrayal of class and attitudes to women.It examines changing attitudes to the book influenced by modern concerns for children's rights, which produces more complex responses to Agnes's treatment and description of her pupils. Fascinating introduction considers the book's fictional and narrative qualities and its relationship with Victorian discourses on child-rearing and the responsibilities of parents.Agnes Grey is based on Anne Brontë's own experiences as a governess and is full of interest both for its autobiographical content and its powerful depiction of the plight of the governess in Victorian society.Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Global Public HealthĮdited by Robert Inglesfield, Hilda Marsden, and with an Introduction by Sally Shuttleworth Oxford World's Classics.The European Society of Cardiology Series.Oxford Commentaries on International Law.
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