Women Writers of the World Books

‘The name of governess, I soon found, was a mere mockery … my pupils had no more notion of obedience than a wild, unbroken colt’ When her family becomes impoverished after a disastrous financial speculation, Agnes Grey determines to find work as a governess in order to contribute to their meagre income and assert her independence. But Agnes’s enthusiasm is swiftly extinguished as she struggles first with the unmanageable Bloomfield children and then with the painful disdain of the haughty Murray family; the only kindness she receives comes from Mr Weston, the sober young curate. Drawing on her own experience, Anne Brontë’s first novel offers a compelling personal perspective on the desperate position of unmarried, educated women for whom becoming a governess was the only respectable career open in Victorian society. This edition also includes Charlotte Brontë’s memoir of her sisters, the Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell . Angeline Goreau examines Anne Brontë’s complex relationship with her sisters and her unhappy career as a governess as influences in writing Agnes Grey .

From the author of Jane Eyre, a strikingly modern story of a young woman starting over—w ith an introduction by Weike Wang, PEN/Hemingway Award–winning author of Chemistry “ Villette ! Villette ! Have you read it?” exclaimed George Eliot when Charlotte Brontë’s final novel appeared in 1853. “It is a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre. There is something almost preternatural in its power.” Arguably Charlotte Brontë’s most refined and deeply felt work—Virginia Woolf called it Brontë’s “finest novel”— Villette draws on its author’s own experiences as a governess, and her profound loneliness following the deaths of her three siblings. It tells the story of parentless, friendless Lucy Snowe, who flees from an unhappy past in England to begin a new life as a teacher at a boarding school in the small French town of Villette. Soon Lucy’s struggle for independence is challenged by both her friendship with a worldly English doctor and her feelings for an autocratic schoolmaster. Brontë’s strikingly modern heroine must decide if there is any man in her society with whom she can live and still be free. The Modern Library Torchbearers series features women who wrote on their own terms, with boldness, creativity, and a spirit of resistance. AMERICAN INDIAN STORIES • THE AWAKENING • THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY • THE HEADS OF CERBERUS • LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET • LOVE, ANGER, MADNESS • PASSING • THE TRANSFORMATION OF PHILIP JETTAN • VILLETTE • THERE IS CONFUSION • THE SELECTED POEMS OF EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

Nella Larsen’s fascinating exploration of race and identity—the inspiration for the Netflix film directed by Rebecca Hall, starring Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga. This Signet Classics edition of Passing includes an Introduction by Brit Bennett, the bestselling author of The Vanishing Half . One of The Atlantic ’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Irene Redfield is a Black woman living an affluent, comfortable life with her husband and children in the thriving neighborhood of Harlem in the 1920s. When she reconnects with her childhood friend Clare Kendry, who is similarly light-skinned, Irene discovers that Clare has been passing for a white woman after severing ties to her past—even hiding the truth from her racist husband. Clare finds herself drawn to Irene’s sense of ease and security with her Black identity and longs for the community (and, increasingly, the woman) she lost. Irene is both riveted and repulsed by Clare and her dangerous secret, as Clare begins to insert herself—and her deception—into every part of Irene’s stable existence. First published in 1929, Larsen’s brilliant examination of the various ways in which we all seek to “pass,”  is as timely as ever.