"penance and mortification for ever": or, How Agnes Grey Bucked the Trend and Found True Happiness

Agnes Grey is a disregarded book by an overlooked author. Anne Brontë's first published novel has long been overshadowed by her sister Emily's Wuthering Heights, due to its joint publication in a three-decker. This essay examines various readings of Agnes Grey and proposes some alternatives. Dividing the novel into sections to show how each portion of Agnes' life suppresses different aspects of her sense of self-hood, it evaluates themes of erasure from a feminist perspective. Using Wolfgang Iser's reader-response theory, this reading is then measured against a small empirical research study to uncover a range of current-day reader responses demonstrating the subtleties and densities of a finely constructed novel.