She is said to have been about twenty when she went to live with, and keep house for, her brother George. She was only about twenty-one when he married, but she may have continued to run his household. She had left in order to become a nun at least a couple of years before his second marriage, late in 1598.

At Bridgenorth MMS and her sister ran a Sunday school. Late in life MMS held a reunion of pupils from this school: a number of elderly, nay, in some instances, really old-looking women. I was thrown aback, touched with some sad reflections, from which I did not immediately recover.

Anne lied about past experience and got a job modelling, together with her sister-in-law Joan . Then she got another job at thirty dollars a week selling lingerie.

OS went to be a governess at Barkly East, thirty miles north-east of Cradock; she was too upset by family disruptions to fulfil her duties, and left after several weeks.

VSW was a lecturer and broadcaster for the BBC as well as a hard-working and prolific journalist. She has a place in any list of influential English gardeners, developing further some of the ideas associated with Gertrude Jekyll , such as the flowerbed or entire garden planted with flowers of a single colour. As early as 1925, at Long Barn, she took pleasure in the idea that the garden she was then creating would outlast her children. In her Observer column on 21 April 1957 she assured a correspondent who assumed she was an armchair gardener that on the contrary she had often broken her fingernails in the soil. Her gardens at Sissinghurst (now owned, despite her horror at the idea, by the National Trust ) are the most visited in England. Journalism and gardening came together in her columns for the The Observer, New Statesman and the Sunday Times.

It was during this lean period that she began writing, teaching (she was probably though not certainly a governess, and possibly worked for Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire ), and acting.

Worried about her family's finances, DR took a job as a pupil-teacher at the Lehrenstalt and Erziehungsanft school in Hanover, Germany, run by Fräulein Lily Pabst .

After leaving Oxford and realising that she could not live at home, MR worked at various temporary jobs. Before becoming a nurse, she was a factory worker in Clark's boot and shoe factory, a counter clerk in the Civil Service, and a laboratory worker in a chocolate factory.

By early 1908 EP was teaching romance languages at another small, private, liberal arts school, Wabash College in Indiana. He was paid $200 a month. Then in his second semester he was caught with a woman in his room (he was apparently just providing shelter and a floor to sleep on). He was fired, then reinstated; then he left.

At this early age she claims that she was able to support herself and her younger sister by sewing.

She duly took up the role of minister and missionary for the Society of Friends . She was active in this calling over the course of her life, preaching in Britain, North America, and Holland. At a yearly meeting after her return from America she noted with satisfaction that God was pleased to lay the weight of the service upon the females; who, though the weaker vessels by nature, are at times rendered strong through his Divine power. She added diplomatically that our brethren rejoiced at God's choosing the women. Late in her memoirs she recalled how years before at Cambridge (one of the seats of learning, I wish I could say of piety) she had convinced a man who did not believe in women's preaching of its weight, efficacy, and consistency with the gospel dispensation.

After graduating with a second-class Oxford degree from Queen's in December 1862, WP returned to London with his sisters. His early attempts to gain a clerical fellowship failed, but in February 1864 he returned to Oxford as the first non-clerical fellow of Brasenose College . He tutored (and later lectured) in the classics. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was among his students.

Before her second husband died, KP had taken up, like her mother before her, a Court post as lady-in-waiting to Princess Mary .

An oil portrait of Hardie by SP hangs in the National Portrait Gallery . Another, in chalk, is also extant. She produced at this time a self-portrait, also in the National Portrait Gallery, in which she wears a headscarf, emblematic of working-class women.

In 1979 LP had a post at the University of Sheffield as Yorkshire Television 's Fellow in Drama and Television. She was also employed to teach at the University of Birmingham . In 1982-3 she was a resident playwright at the Royal Court Theatre in London.

GO began his short career of service to the British Empire in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma.

She had suddenly conceived the ambition of becoming an artist (the only profession open to her, as a girl of good family) when she heard that this was the choice of the cousin with whom she had studied in Paris (who, however, had the advantage of a brother who was an art student). She was haunted by the spectre of her own mediocrity, though she succeeded in exhibiting three years running at the Royal Academy . During what she calls her artistic career, she did a portrait (which she later called jolly bad) of Sir Henry Irving in the role of Goldsmith 's Vicar Wakefield, which years later was hanging in the National Museum of Dramatic Art in Budapest. She considered herself an artist by profession, and worked (like her husband) at illustrating books.

SG secured her first job as a cable decoder for the British United Press , a news service.

Charlotte Stetson 's professional life began with her arrival in Pasadena, California. There she found work as both a teacher and a writer, though she was unable to earn much.