Agnes Grey
A vicar's daughter takes a post as a governess and discovers that she is neither a servant nor a member of the family. Anne Brontë had done the job herself, and the novel's flat, unadorned sentences are part of its argument: this is what the work was actually like.
There is a love story, and it is handled with unusual restraint. The value of the book now is documentary. It records the daily humiliations of a position that employed thousands of educated women and gave them almost no authority, and it does so without asking for pity.
Public-domain status
First published in 1847. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Anne Brontë died in 1849, so this work has been free to republish there since 1920.
Read the text free
- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 767 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
- Internet Archive — scanned editions and free audiobooks
- Open Library — edition history and borrowable copies
Keep reading
- Jane Eyre — Charlotte Brontë, 1847
- Wuthering Heights — Emily Brontë, 1847
- Bleak House — Charles Dickens, 1853
- Oliver Twist — Charles Dickens, 1838
- Haworth — the city behind the books
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
Find a print edition on Amazon · As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Disclosure