SOURCE: "Anne Brontë: Her Life and Writings," in Indiana University Studies, Vol. XVI, No. 83, March, 1929, pp. 3-44.

In the following excerpt, Hale suggests that Agnes Grey is primarily an autobiographical work and that it is of interest to the scholar of the mid-Victorian novel and for the insights it provides into the mind of Brontë herself.

Agnes Grey is the barest sort of story, without color and without humor. Unlighted by the least play of fancy, it presents a bald, literal chronicle of events as drab as life itself. It has no improbabilities, no flights of the imagination, no romance. It is realism in the literal sense of the word, life as it actually is, without exaggeration and without adornment. It is just the sort of realism that William Dean Howells asserted that he wrote when he called Dickens' novels romances. Produced at the same time (1846) as The...