Agnes Grey

'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…