Agnes Grey Reading Order

Agnes Grey (1847) by Anne Brontë is the shortest and most directly autobiographical of the Brontë novels — published in the same three-volume set as Wuthering Heights (as the first two volumes to Emily's third), it follows Agnes Grey, a clergyman's daughter who becomes a governess and records her experiences in two households with unflinching honesty about the cruelty, indifference, and condescension with which governesses were typically treated. Anne Brontë worked as a governess herself, and Agnes Grey is essentially a direct transcription of her experience — the spoiled children who are never corrected, the parents who treat the governess as a social non-entity, and the professional isolation of a woman who is neither servant nor family member. The novel is usually overshadowed by Wuthering Heights and by Anne's later Tenant of Wildfell Hall, but it is the most precisely observed domestic novel in the Brontë canon and an essential document of Victorian women's employment.