ABSTRACT
Actually, at the beginning of Agnes Grey, the young heroine has every requirement for deserved happiness but one. She has intelligence, youthful vigor, beauty, even a kind of wit, and certainly good-naturedness. Everywhere it is clear that she has the love of those around her. Indeed, one of the central points of the first chapter is that she thinks of herself as happy. Her goal in life is to develop and grow emotionally until she is ready for marriage with a man she can love, thus finding the beginnings of self-fulfillment she deserves. The only threat to her well-being, a threat of which she is not totally aware, is herself: good as she is, she is deficient in the kind of mental toughness gained through hard experience that she will need to survive gracefully her impending ordeal.
