'Agnes is a quieter heroine than Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights's Cathy Earnshaw, but she burns with her own anger. Agnes Grey is often a furious novel, and a feminist novel.' - The Guardian

Agnes Grey was written not only as a beautifully lyrical novel, but an exposé of the frequently isolated, stagnant, and emotionally starved conditions under which many governesses worked in the mid-nineteenth century. A deeply personal novel written from the author's own experience, 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.