Agnes Grey

Product Description 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 Brontë 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. About the Author Anne Bronte (1820-1849), a British novelist and poet, was the youngest member of the famous Bronte literary family. She wrote a volume of poetry with her sisters, Charlotte and Emily, entitled Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, and she is the author of the novels Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Anne's two novels, written in a sharp and ironic style, are completely different from the romanticism followed by her more famous sisters. She wrote in a realistic, rather than a romantic style. Anne Flosnik, a seasoned audiobook narrator, has over four hundred titles to her credit and several awards and distinctions, including AudioFile Earphones Awards, a USA Today Recommended Listening selection, an AudioFile "Best Narration of the Year" selection in 2009, and the American Library Association's Special Services to Children Award. She has also been a finalist for the prestigious Audie Award for best narration. She is an award-winning British actress with lead credits on stage, on television, and in commercials and voice-overs.