SOURCE: "'An Alien among Strangers': The Governess as Narrator in Agnes Grey," in Anne Brontë, Twayne Publishers, 1996, pp. 82-116.

In the following excerpt, Frawley probes the narrative technique and themes of social isolation and alienation and of female voicelessness in Agnes Grey.

Agnes Grey and the Family Plot

The domestic ideology to which Brontë responded in her novel represented the nuclear family as a panacea for most social ills. In many ways, the married woman and mother stood at the center of this idealized family, for she was keeper of the home and selfless beholder of the moral virtues associated with family life. In its evocation of Agnes's family life, Agnes Grey participates in an important cultural moment in the history of the family, one that complicates this sentimental picture of the traditional Victorian family. Through the structure of the novel itself, as well as in the selection...