Teaser Tuesday 123: Agnes Grey

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

* Grab your current book or recent read.
* Share a few “teaser” sentences from somewhere in the book.
* BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (Make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away. You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
* Share the title and author so that other participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teaser!


Started Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë over the weekend for a GoodReads group read. I was hoping to finish it Sunday but...I was too easily distracted by other things, so am just finishing up tonight (Monday). This is a short classic about the life of a governess during the mid-nineteenth century and is quite good. My teaser comes from near the end of the novel.

My first impulse was to sink into the chair beside the bed; and laying my head on the pillow, to seek relief in a passionate burst of tears; there was an imperative craving for such an indulgence; but, alas! I must restrain and swallow back my feelings still: there was the bell—the odious bell for the schoolroom dinner; and I must go down with a calm face, and smile, and laugh, and talk nonsense—yes, and eat, too, if possible, as if all was right, and I was just returned from a pleasant walk.

(Chapter XV)


And because this one made me laugh:

I was about to follow; but Mr Weston had an umbrella too, and offered me the benefit of its shelter, for it was raining heavily.

‘No, thank you, I don’t mind the rain,’ I said. I always lacked common sense when taken by surprise.

(Chapter XVI)

ABOUT THE BOOK:
Note: My edition is from Wordsworth Classics, published in 1998.

Agnes Grey is a trenchant exposé of the frequently isolated, intellectually stagnant and emotionally starved conditions under which many governesses worked in the mid-nineteenth century.

This is a deeply personal novel written from the author’s own experience and as such Agnes Grey has a power and poignancy which mark it out as a landmark work of literature dealing with the social and moral evolution of English society during the last century.