Paperback. Black cover with white title.

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Agnes Grey is a trenchant exposé of the frequently isolated, intellectually stagnant and emotionally starved conditions under which many governesses worked in the mid-nineteenth century. This is a deeply personal novel written from the author’s own experience and as such Agnes Grey has a power and poignancy which mark it out as a landmark work of literature dealing with the social and moral evolution of English society during the last century.

REVIEW: Although I read Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall many years ago, I had never read Agnes Grey until recently, and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. Anne Bronte had a superb command of English and the way she writes it is a joy to read. She certainly knew how to tell a story and Agnes Grey gains because it’s so well focussed. Avoiding tedious embellishments, Anne keeps to the point with the result that the reader is readily able to gain a very good impression of how life was like for a good many governesses in early Victorian England. Anne writes so well the reader can feel that he/she is there with Agnes Grey as she struggles to maintain order and teach her unruly pupils. Besides all this, the reader is given a very good impression of how marriages were arranged among the upper classes in the mid Nineteenth Century. Anne Bronte brings it out how both her heroine, Agnes Grey, and Agnes’ mother married for love, which she contrasts with the unhappiness of Rosalie Murray in her arranged marriage, which Rosalie chose to enter into rather than wed the man who truly loved her. Rosalie and her sister Matilda were Agnes Grey’s pupils in her second stint as governess, which was rather better than the difficult time she had during her first appointment with the Bloomfield family. Agnes eventually marries a young clergyman, who has just been appointed as rector of a £300.00 per year living. One gets the impression that this is how Anne would have liked things to turn out for herself. Sadly she died of TB aged only 29. One can only wonder at the great works she might have written had she lived into old age. We can only be sad that someone with such a beautiful mind and strength of character should have died so young. Thank you Anne for writing such a revealing, succinct and very readable masterpiece.

Anne Brontë (17 January 1820 – 28 May 1849) was an English novelist and poet, the youngest member of the Brontë literary family. At 19 she left Haworth and worked as a governess between 1839 and 1845. After leaving her teaching position, she fulfilled her literary ambitions. She published a volume of poetry with her sisters and two novels. Agnes Grey, based upon her experiences as a governess, was published in 1847. Her second and last novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which is considered to be one of the first sustained feminist novels, appeared in 1848. Like her poems, both her novels were first published under the masculine pen name of Acton Bell. Anne’s life was cut short when she died of what is now suspected to be pulmonary tuberculosis at the age of 29. Partly because the re-publication of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was prevented by Charlotte Brontë after Anne’s death, she is not as well known as her sisters. However, her novels, like those of her sisters, have become classics of English literature.

NOTE: This is an original  book from the library gathered by the famous Cambridge Don, computer scientist, food and wine connoisseur, Jack Arnold LANG. Note: Jack founded the Michelin Guide ‘Midsummer House’- Cambridge’s paramount restaurant. This dining experience is hidden amongst the grassy pastures and grazing cattle of Midsummer Common and perched on the banks of the River Cam.

In 2008, Jack was one of the co-founders of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, alongside other members of the Department, and acted as the Foundation’s Chair. The project’s original goals were modest: to build and distribute low-cost computers for prospective applicants to our Computer Science degree. Initially the project was a “success disaster”, as Jack would say, as demand far outstripped the low-scale manufacturing plans. Ultimately the Raspberry Pi became the UK’s most successful computer with more than 60 million sold to date. Jack was drawn to the educational possibilities of the Raspberry Pi, its potential uses in emerging economies and the way it could support self-directed learning.