Agnes Grey

Agnes Grey is the first novel of the English writer Anne Brontë, published in December 1847 under the pen name Acton Bell and reissued in a second edition in 1850.

Agnes is the daughter of a poor clergyman and a woman whose family disapproved of the marriage, and when the household loses what money it had, she takes the only respectable work available to a woman of her class who has no fortune. She is engaged as a governess, first for a family whose children are allowed to do as they please and then for another where the parents are indifferent and the eldest daughter is being raised for the marriage market. The novel shows her position in detail: she is neither family nor servant, she has no authority to discipline the children she is responsible for, and the kindnesses she receives are entirely at the discretion of her employers.

Brontë worked as a governess for five years, and the book draws on what she saw in those houses. It addresses the treatment of women and of servants, isolation, and the ordinary animals of a household, whose welfare is one of the novel's running concerns.