Agnes Grey
Agnes Grey, A Novel is the first novel by English author Anne Brontë (writing under the pen name of "Acton Bell"), first published in December 1847, and republished in a second edition in 1850.The choice of central character allows Anne to deal with issues of oppression, abuse of women and governesses, isolation, and ideas of empathy.Agnes Grey also mimics some of the stylistic approaches of a bildungsroman, employing ideas of personal growth and coming of age.Modern critics have made more subdued claims admiring Agnes Grey with a less overt praise of Brontë's work than Moore.[4] It is likely that Anne was the first of the Brontë sisters to write a work of prose for publication,[5] although Agnes Grey, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre were all published within the same year: 1847.Rosalie confides that she despises Sir Thomas Ashby (and her mother-in-law), and claims he only left London because he was jealous of all the gentlemen she was attracting.Stevie Davies points to the intellectual wit behind the text: The genuineness of texture and dialogue in Agnes Grey is the product of minute observations, focused by a fine authorial irony and delicate power of understatement.[4]Cates Baldridge describes Agnes Grey as a novel which "takes great pains to announce itself as a bildungsroman" but in fact never allows its character to grow up or transform for ideological reasons.[9] In April 1839, she took up a position as a governess with the Ingham family of Blake Hall, Mirfield, in Yorkshire, about 20 miles away from Haworth, to whom the Bloomfields bear some resemblance.[10] One of the more memorable scenes from the novel, in which Agnes kills a group of birds to save them from being tortured by Tom Bloomfield, was taken from an actual incident.[10] Anne found a post at Thorp Green, Little Ouseburn, near York, around 70 miles away, just as Agnes' second position is further from home, with older pupils—Lydia Robinson, 15.Agnes is derived from the Greek for chaste, hagne, and Grey commonly is associated with "Quakers and quietists to express radical dissociation from gaudy worldiness".[12] However, he also points to several sections that are "wholly fictitious": the opening and Agnes's return home after failure in her first post; the love story which develops during her second period as a governess; the marriage and disillusionment of Rosalie Murray; and, above all, the happy ending.[17] In Conversation in Ebury Street, the Irish novelist George Moore provided a commonly cited example of these newer reviews, overtly praising the style of the novel.However, Pinion felt that Moore's examination of the piece was a little extreme and that his "preoccupation with style must have blinded him to the persistence of her moral purpose" of Agnes Grey.