Extrait : "Toutes les histoires vraies portent avec elles une instruction, bien que dans quelques-unes le trésor soit difficile à trouver, et si mince en quantité, que le noyau sec et ridé ne vaut souvent pas la peine que l'on a eue de casser la noix. Qu'il en soit ainsi ou non de mon histoire, c'est ce dont je ne puis juger avec compétence. Je pense pourtant qu'elle peut être utile à quelques-uns, et intéressante pour d'autres ; (...)"

"Agnès Grey" est un roman écrit par Anne Brontë et publié en 1847, sous le nom de plume Acton Bell. Le nom masculin lui a permis de se faire publier à une époque où les femmes n’étaient pas bienvenues en dehors de la sphère privée de la maison.Cadette d'une famille heureuse mais ruinée, Agnès, fille de pasteur, devient gouvernante pour soutenir financièrement ses parents. La gouvernante au XIXème siècle a un statut spécial: au-dessus du domestique, aussi ou mieux éduquée que les maîtres, mais malgré tout inférieure et obligée d'obéir. Agnès est pleine d'enthousiasme, persuadée qu'elle va participer à l'éducation de jeunes filles qui deviendront des demoiselles accomplies grâce à ses soins. Mais la déception est grande: dans la première famille où elle trouve un emploi, elle est considérée comme une simple servante et doit faire face à de petits enfants totallement insupportables, dont les parents lui interdisent toute marque d'autorité tout en lui reprochant de ne pas les mettre au pas. Sa deuxième expérience sera elle aussi assez loin des attentes d'Agnès...

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a powerful and sometimes violent novel of expectation, love, oppression, sin, religion and betrayal. It portrays the disintegration of the marriage of Helen Huntingdon, the mysterious 'tenant' of the title, and her dissolute, alcoholic husband. Defying convention, Helen leaves her husband to protect their young son from his father s influence, and earns her own living as an artist. Whilst in hiding at Wildfell Hall, she encounters Gilbert Markham, who falls in love with her. On its first publication in 1848, Anne Bronte's second novel was criticised for being 'coarse' and 'brutal'. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall challenges the social conventions of the early nineteenth century in a strong defence of women's rights in the face of psychological abuse from their husbands. Anne Bronte's style is bold, naturalistic and passionate, and this novel, which her sister Charlotte considered 'an entire mistake', has earned Anne a position in English literature in her own right, not just as the youngest member of the Bronte family.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a novel by Anne Bronte, published in 1848. The novel tells the story of Helen Huntington and her disastrous marriage to her husband along with the challenges she faces raising her young son on her own.

Anne Brontë serves a twofold purpose in the study of what the Brontës wrote and were. In the first place, her gentle and delicate presence, her sad, short story, her hard life and early death, enter deeply into the poetry and tragedy that have always been entwined with the memory of the Brontës, as women and as writers; in the second, the books and poems that she wrote serve as matter of comparison by which to test the greatness of her two sisters. She is the measure of their genius—like them, yet not with them. Many years after Anne’s death her brother-in-law protested against a supposed portrait of her, as giving a totally wrong impression of the ‘dear, gentle Anne Brontë.’ ‘Dear’ and ‘gentle’ indeed she seems to have been through life, the youngest and prettiest of the sisters, with a delicate complexion, a slender neck, and small, pleasant features. Notwithstanding, she possessed in full the Brontë seriousness, the Brontë strength of will. When her father asked her at four years old what a little child like her wanted most, the tiny creature replied—if it were not a Brontë it would be incredible!—‘Age and experience.’ When the three children started their ‘Island Plays’ together in 1827, Anne, who was then eight, chose Guernsey for her imaginary island, and peopled it with ‘Michael Sadler, Lord Bentinck, and Sir Henry Halford.’ She and Emily were constant companions, and there is evidence that they shared a common world of fancy from very early days to mature womanhood. ‘The Gondal Chronicles’ seem to have amused them for many years, and to have branched out into innumerable books, written in the ‘tiny writing’ of which Mr. Clement Shorter has given us facsimiles. ‘I am now engaged in writing the fourth volume of Solala Vernon’s Life,’ says Anne at twenty-one. And four years later Emily says, ‘The Gondals still flourish bright as ever. I am at present writing a work on the First War. Anne has been writing some articles on this and a book by Henry Sophona. We intend sticking firm by the rascals as long as they delight us, which I am glad to say they do at present.’

Extrait : "A l'époque où les habitants de Fieldhead revinrent à Briarfield, Caroline était à peu près rétablie. Miss Keeldar, qui avait reçu par la poste des nouvelles de la convalescence de son amie, ne laissa pas une heure s'écouler entre son arrivée au manoir et sa visite à la rectorerie."