Play Audiobook Sample
Agnes Grey Audiobook
Play Audiobook Sample
(4.05) - 0 listener ratings
Quick Stats About this Audiobook
Total Audiobook Chapters:
Longest Chapter Length:
Shortest Chapter Length:
Average Chapter Length:
Audiobooks by this Author:
Publisher Description
Written when she was twenty-six, Agnes Grey is Anne Brontë'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 Brontë 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.
Download and start listening now!
[McCaddon] makes the young protagonist come to life in her nuanced first-person reading; her crisp and educated voice conveying the narrator’s energy and persistent optimism, while renderings of Agnes’ masters, mistresses, and young charges show them for the uncouth bullies that they actually are, despite their superior airs and flaunted gentility.
— Kliatt
Quotes
-
“The most perfect prose narrative in English letters.”
— George Moore, novelist -
“Anne Brontë attacks her problem with a freedom and audacity before which her sisters boldest enterprises seem cowardly and restrained…Her behavior is revolutionary.”
— May Sinclair, novelist and suffragist -
“Agnes Grey is a charming novel, full of fine character painting and strongly marked by the exquisite development and analysis of the female heart…Agnes Grey, the heroine, herself, is one of the most vigorous and truthful drawings of character, one of the finest pieces of pen-limning that we have encountered anywhere.”
— Graham’s Magazine (1850) -
“I should like to give it to every family with a governess and shall read it through again when I have a governess to remind me to be human.”
— Lady Amberly
Agnes Grey Listener Reviews
Be the first to write a review about this audiobook!
About Anne Brontë
Anne Brontë (1820–1849) was born in Yorkshire, the youngest of six children. Her mother died within a year of her birth, and her two eldest siblings died four years later. The Brontë children were raised in an isolated Yorkshire parsonage, where they thrived in fantasy worlds that drew on their voracious reading of Byron, Scott, Shakespeare, and Gothic fiction. Anne’s first novel, Agnes Grey, was published in a volume together with Emily’s Wuthering Heights in 1847. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall reflects her brother Branwell’s gradual descent into alcoholism, drug addiction, and madness. Both Branwell and Emily died of tuberculosis in 1848; Anne succumbed to the same illness in 1849.
About Wanda McCaddon
Wanda McCaddon (d. 2023) narrated well over six hundred titles for major audiobook publishers, sometimes with the pseudonym Nadia May or Donada Peters. She earned the prestigious Audio Award for best narration and numerous Earphones Awards. She was named a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine.