Agnes Grey Themes

Agnes Grey suggests that children learn their behavior and values first and foremost from their parents and families. Rich parents try to offload the responsibility of educating their children in values as well as academic subjects onto governesses, women of their genteel social class but a lower economic class. Yet because the parents treat governesses like servants, not equals, the governesses lack the authority to enforce their teachings. Thus, rich children learn to treat the…

In Agnes Grey, genteel women are pressured to marry for money and rank and punished socially if they don’t—yet the novel suggests that women who marry for love have at least a chance at happiness, while those who marry for money end up miserable. The novel illustrates the pressure women face to marry for money and rank through both Agnes’s mother and Agnes’s student Rosalie Murray. Agnes’s mother, the daughter of a…

Agnes Grey illustrates how hierarchies lead to cruelty unless those high in the hierarchy receive careful moral educations—which few of them do. This pattern appears both in Agnes’s employers’ treatment of her and various high-ranking characters’ treatment of animals. When Agnes is working for the Bloomfields, for instance, her young charge Tom Bloomfield is the spoiled prince of the Bloomfield family, and so he sits at the top of the domestic hierarchy. Because…

Agnes Grey suggests that all too frequently, people practice religion in an insincere way—but when they practice it sincerely, it can be a great comfort in adversity. The novel’s main example of religious insincerity is Mr. Hatfield, the rector at the village parish in Horton, where Agnes lives with the Murray family. Mr. Hatfield uses his elevated social status as rector to socialize with his rich parishioners and terrify his poor parishioners with threats…