SOURCE: "Agnes Grey: Accommodating Reality," in Anne Brontë: A New Critical Assessment, Vision Press Limited, 1983, pp. 9-44.

In the following essay, Scott evaluates the realism, theme, style, and contemporary relevance of Agnes Grey, acknowledging the work's simplicity and brevity but seeing these as among its strengths.

Agnes Grey has three principal purposes: a paedogogic one; a protest against tyranny; and an attempt to reconcile the passionate yearning heart with life's realities, with its actual possibilities.

We underrate the novel if its brevity and simplicity of construction cause us to think the handling of these themes is slight.

As a story it is simple enough. The eponymous young heroine, who narrates the whole, grows up in a good-natured loving North of England family, the daughter of a clergyman, who loses on a business speculation even the 'snug little property of his own' which has amplified hitherto their modest circumstances...