Poor Anne Bronte is always overshadowed by her sisters but she was truly great in her own right. Agnes Grey is a beautiful, touching story. One must read between the lines to truly appreaciate it, to sense Agnes's longing that tortured her so and tortured her all the more because she could speak of it to no one. The book is also an outcry on the pitiful, servile position of the governess in the 19th century. Relevant today? Oh yes. How many of us love and suffer in silence, how many of us, even in today's world as modern women find ourselves maltreated in the workplace and unable at times to do anything about it? That Agnes' story has a happy ending is perhaps conventional, yet, it makes me wish Anne's own short life had ended as well. And also. Who knows what secret pain Anne carried? It must have been there or else she would not have been able to write so moving a book as Agnes Grey.