Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) branded Anne Brontë’s first novel a work which ‘pretty literally describes her own experience as a governess’. Anne’s own insistence concerning the veracity of her work in the Preface to the second edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), detailed that while Agnes Grey had been ‘accused of extravagant over-colouring’, it was indeed ‘carefully copied from the life, with a most scrupulous avoidance of all exaggeration’. This corroboration of the autobiographical nature of Anne’s novel, along with what we know of Anne’s experiences as a working governess, has since formed foundational understandings of the text. Readings of Agnes Grey as inherently autobiographical are supported by relatively modern editions, such as in Angeline Goreau’s introduction to the 2004 Penguin Classics edition:These claims to veracity are complicated however by Agnes’ description of herself as one ‘shielded by obscurity’, a ‘close and resolute dissembler’. As such, Sally Shuttleworth’s introduction to the 2010 Oxford World Classics edition declares that the novel ‘should not be read as autobiography’, contending that ‘intensity of personal experience contributes to the passion of a novel which deals with a subject, the plight of the governess, which was receiving sympathetic attention in the press at the time’. Though this is an important distinction to make, and makes significant efforts to move Brontë’s novel away from autobiographical readings, Shuttleworth struggles, in the words of Maria Frawley, ‘to thread the needle and offers up an understanding of Agnes Grey that still seems delimited by autobiographical interest, reduced to a sub-genre (the governess novel), and thereby restricted in socio-historical scope’. While autobiographical readings of the text are helpful in providing insight into Anne’s life and character where little historical evidence remains, the acceptance that Agnes Grey was written solely from experience immediately restricts the possibility of other influences. This chapter does not refute the autobiographical nature of Agnes Grey, but suggests the presence of Byronic influence in the text, just as both Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott are credited with influencing elements of Charlotte’s Jane Eyre which was inspired by her own time as a governess.