Agnes Grey. OUP's new edition

Oxford University Press has released a new edition of Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey:

Agnes Grey
New Edition
Anne Brontë
Edited by Robert Inglesfield, Hilda Marsden, and Sally Shuttleworth
Oxford University Press
Oxford World's Classics
978-0-19-929698-9 |
Paperback | 10 June 2010

* 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.
* Fascinating introduction considers the book's fictional and narrative qualities and its relationship with Victorian discourses on child-rearing and the responsibilities of parents. 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.
* 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.
* Revised and updated bibliography.
* Revised notes drawing on the latest critical material.
* Retains the authoritative Clarendon text in new setting.

New to this edition

* Critically up-to-date introduction by Sally Shuttleworth.
* Revised and updated Select Bibliography.
* Revised Chronology.
* Revised Explanatory Notes.
* Authoritative Clarendon text retained and reset.

'How delightful it would be to be a governess!'

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. Instead she finds the young children she has to deal with completely unmanageable. They are, as she observes to her mother, 'unimpressible, incomprehensible creatures'. 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. 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.

The novel combines astute dissection of middle-class social behaviour and class attitudes with a wonderful study of Victorian responses to young children which has parallels with debates about education that continue to this day.

Categories: Agnes Grey, Books