Agnes Grey

A clergyman's daughter takes work as a governess in two households and finds that her employers regard her as furniture. Anne Brontë had done the job for five years and wrote it down exactly; George Moore called it the most perfect prose narrative in English literature, which is high, but the plainness is the point. Fifty-nine plates of painting from 1841 to 1910, among them James Tissot and Marianne North, gather the drawing rooms, salons and quiet corners where a governess is seen and not heard.