ABSTRACT
Anne Bronte's first novel was somewhat overshadowed by the fiction of her sisters, partly because it appeared as part of a three-volume set, along with Wuthering Heights, which occupied the other two volumes, and partly because critics speculated that the sisters' three pseudonyms belonged to the same writer. Anne Bronte's fiction is frequently dismissed in a cursory fashion as less passionate and original than the fiction of her two better-known sisters; when her fiction is discussed. The second, and more obviously complex of her two novels, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, receives most of the attention, while Agnes Grey is often described as slight and emotionally flat. As a condition of her employment, self-repression and the suppression of speech are continually required of Agnes. Agnes Grey demonstrates that neither gender nor social class alone is explanatory: both class and gender are significant factors in determining who wields the power of language, the power to silence others.
