Written when she was twenty-six, Agnes Grey is Anne Bronte's first novel. It tells the story of a rector's daughter who has to earn her living as a governess. Drawing directly from her own experiences, Anne Bronte set out to describe the immense pressures that the governess's life involved: the frustration, the isolation, and the insensitive and cruel treatment on the part of employers and their families.
Mature, insightful, and edged with a quiet irony, this debut displays a keen sense of moral responsibility and a sharp eye for bourgeois attitudes and behavior.
"May makes the young protagonist come to life in her nuanced first-person reading; her crisp and educated voice conveying the narrator's energy and persistent optimism, while renderings of Agnes' masters, mistresses, and young charges show them for the uncouth bullies that they actually are, despite their superior airs and flaunted gentility. -- Kliatt
Anne Bronte was born in Yorkshire in 1820. The Bronte children were raised in an isolated parsonage, where they thrived in fantasy worlds that drew on their voracious reading of Byron, Scott, Shakespeare, and Gothic fiction. Anne's first novel, Agnes Grey, was published together with her sister Emily's Wuthering Heights in 1847. She died of tuberculosis in 1849, shortly after Emily and brother Branwell died of the same illness.
Nadia May is one of the pioneers of audiobook narration, with twenty-five years of recording and over 600 titles to her credit. Named one of AudioFile's Golden Voices, she has won fourteen Earphones Awards. She is also a well known stage actor in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lives with her husband and two badly behaved dogs.
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