Agnes vive con su familia de clase media, sus padres y su hermana mayor Maria. Su padre es clerigo y su madre, que pertenecia a un nivel social superior al de su esposo, es una mujer vital, energica y de caracter. Viven felices y en armonia hasta que una inversion fallida hace que la situacion economica de la familia se vea seriamente afectada. Tras la oposicion familiar inicial, finalmente Agnes logra que se le permita trabajar de institutriz- le gustan los ninos y se ve capaz de desempenar correctamente su trabajo- y se instala con su primera familia, los Bloomfield, que no resultaran lo que ella esperaba y con los que no logra encajar. Luego vendran los Murray, de mayor rango. Alli conocera a Edward Weston, cura ayudante del vicario de la localidad. El ostracismo en el que vive con los Murray se hace evidente. Rosalie, la coqueta hija mayor de la familia, no le pondra las cosas nada faciles… La vida no parece sonreirle precisamente.

In her daring first novel, the youngest Bronte sister drew upon her own experiences to tell the unvarnished truth about life as a governess. Like Agnes Grey, Anne Bronte was a young middle-class Victorian lady whose family fortunes had faltered. Like so many other unmarried women of the nineteenth century, Bronte accepted the only “respectable” employment available–and entered a world of hardship, humiliation, and loneliness. Written with a realism that shocked critics, this biting social commentary offers a sympathetic portrait of Agnes and a moving indictment of her brutish and haughty employers. Separated from her family and friends by many miles, paid little more than subsistence wages, Agnes stands alone–both in society at large and in a household where she is neither family member nor servant. Agnes Grey remains a landmark in the literature of social history. In addition to its challenge to the era’s chauvinism and materialism, it features a first-person narrative that offers a rare opportunity to hear the voice of a Victorian working woman.

Written when she was twenty-six, Agnes Grey is Anne Bront+ 1/2’s first novel. It tells the story of a rector’s daughter who has to earn her living as a governess when her family enters a financial crisis. Drawing directly from her own experiences, Anne Bront+ 1/2 set out to describe the immense pressures that the governess’ life involved: the frustration, the isolation, and the insensitive and cruel treatment on the part of employers and their families.

Mature, insightful, and edged with a quiet irony, this debut displays a keen sense of moral responsibility and sharp eye for bourgeois attitudes and behavior–and the corrosive power of wealth.

Written when women-and workers generally-had few rights in England, Agnes Grey exposes the brutal inequities of the rigid class system in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. Agnes comes from a respectable middle-class family, but their financial reverses have forced her to seek work as a governess. Pampered and protected at home, she is unprepared for the harsh reality of a governess’s life. At the Bloomfields and, later, the Murrays, she suffers under the snobbery and sadism of the selfish, self-indulgent upper-class adults and the shrieking insolence of their spoiled children. Worse, the unique social and economic position of a governess-“beneath” her employers but “above” their servants-condemns her to a life of loneliness.
Less celebrated than her older sisters, Charlotte and Emily, Anne Bronteuml; was also less interested in spinning wildly symbolic, romantic tales and more determined to draw realistic images of conditions in Victorian England that needed changing. While Charlotte’s Jane Eyre features a governess who eventually and improbably marries her employer, Agnes Grey deals with the actual experiences of middle-class working women, experiences Anne had herself endured during her hateful tenure as a governess.

Like her sisters Emily and Charlotte, Anne Brontë published under a male pseudonym, yet still this novel was scorned by many for its exposure of the abusive male chauvinism that was concealed, like all things sexual, during the Victorian Era.

Just as Anne had to use a male pseudonym in order to publish, Helen Graham, the novel’s protagonist and a battered wife, must assume an alias in order to gain freedom from her suffering. With her young child, Helen takes up residence at Wildfell Hall, shrouding her past in secrecy yet earning the attentions of a young unmarried country gentleman. Anne Brontë employs the atmosphere of the bleak Yorkshire moors and the cold, rugged gloom of the fictional mansion to set the stage for a tragedy that reveals the secret violence in a society considered well-mannered.

With a powerful plot that reveals the troubles of the times, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is now lauded as a classic of Victorian literature.

Helen Huntingdon flees a disastrous marriage and retreats to the desolate, half-ruined moorland mansion, Wildfell Hall. With her small son, Arthur, she adopts an assumed name and makes her living as a painter. The inconvenience of the house is outweighed by the fact that she and Arthur are removed from her drunken, degenerate husband.

Although the house is isolated, she seeks to avoid the attentions of the neighbors. However, it is difficult to do so. All too soon she becomes an object of speculation, then cruel gossip.

Narrated by her neighbor Gilbert Markham, and from the pages of her own diary, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall portrays Helen’s struggle for independence in a time when law and society defined a married woman as her husband’s property.

Who is this woman? The townspeople think she may be from a foreign country and gossip runs rampant. Having arrived in the middle of the night at Wildfell Hall with her paints and her easel, Helen sets up shop as a single mother in mid -19th century England. Although Gilbert could not say from where or whence she came, there is something in Helen that resonates with something in him and it is nothing short of divine. A universal tribute to the artist; you’ll need a cup of tea for this. Hear the characters come to life in this audiobook.