While in Surrey, LDG established a reading-room and subscription library for local men.

In Ireland COCE first developed an interest in poor people's housing, and became a lecturer for the Board of Agriculture and Technical Instruction . Together with Horace Plunkett (agricultural reformer, pioneer of the co-operative movement, and cousin of Emily Lawless ), she supported plans for rural regeneration. These two were together responsible for the founding of many technical schools and for a great deal of valuable social work in Ireland.

According to ABE 's cousin Matilda Betham-Edwards , Amelia began life as a professional musician, with the post of organist at Wood Green, Hornsey (not yet part of London, but in the country). For years she practised eight hours a day on the piano and worked seriously at her singing, as well as composing music for the organ, for other instruments, and for voice. She added the guitar and the organ to her own instrumental repertoire in 1849, and took up her organist post the next year. A couple of years later she switched from music to professional writing, by which she was able to support her family when her father's bank failed.

GE worked at a variety of different jobs to earn enough money to support her sisters and brothers. One of her posts was as a nurse in a London hospital for a time.

Once they were married, the two lived in Copenhagen for some time and each began to establish an art career. LE worked primarily as a painter during this period.

As a courtesan, GE reached the top of her profession by including on her roster of lovers three royal personages in two countries: the French king's brother and cousin, and the English king's eldest son.

Although her life was a quiet one, she did not want for occupation: she was a talented musician and composer, although she grew dissatisfied with her singing, and gave it up later in life. According to Sebastian Evans, music was part of her. It was the art she most keenly appreciated and best understood. While she enjoyed all kinds of music, she was particularly fond of Beethoven . She wrote music to sing and dance to, and her dance music was particularly successful.

Apart from other writing-life activities like reading her poems in London and on tour, BE has a successful career as an academic teacher of creative writing. She has worked in the UK at the University of East Anglia , Goldsmiths' College , Brunel University (where she is Reader in Creative Writing), and at Barnard College , New York, Georgetown University , Washington, DC, the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, and elsewhere.

As a daughter at home she had many projects to occupy her. She taught her younger siblings and worked hard in her father's parish. It was owing to her efforts that Ecclesfield acquired a village library. She taught her Class for Young Women at home because of her delicate health. She was fond of sketching outdoors, recording among other subjects the local crafts of carpet-weaving and clog-making.

In MallorcaRF had a job with a travel agency, and back in London she worked as an interviewer for Market Research .

Elizabeth Cary was mentioned by John Davies of Hereford in 1612 (with Lady Pembroke and Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford ) as a leading patron.

During the first world war, EF worked briefly as a typist for the Women's Emergency Corps (established on 6 August 1914). After the war, she cared devotedly for her ailing mother for about a decade, and secretly supplemented the invaluable parlourmaid's wages out of her own pocket.

After giving up the idea of law, EF found work as a supply teacher. She then got a much better job with a publisher, Deighton Bell (publishers of Scrutiny), but was fired when she became pregnant, as was then normal practice.

Before the First World War EHY was a keen climber or mountaineer. During the war she worked in a munitions factory after some time as a groom. She joined the Society of Authors during the 1920s, and also became a member of PEN .

As a schoolgirl, Eva dreamed of becoming an actress, which she never became.

PF writes of her experience in the Second World War: During the Blitz I was working at Broadcasting House, as one of the lowliest employees, a Recorded Programmes Assistant. The job in fact involved a lot of fetching and carrying. When the sirens went to signal an air-raid, she wrote later, she never went into a shelter, this being due to a crass lack of imagination. I felt obstinate—let them all come!—this, too, being a matter of ignorance. I woke to the unmistakable rustle and hiss of glass being swept up. I walked to work, proud to be earning £400 p.a., and taking more and more elaborate routes as the streets were cordoned off on account of unexploded bombs. At times there was no bread in Lyons shop windows, only cold baked potatoes.

View reference

Fitzgerald, Penelope. “Nuthouse Al”. London Review of Books, 18 Feb. 1999, p. 12.

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For entertainment she went to a place called the Nuthouse. She added, What trivialities, before anyone I cared deeply about had been lost or killed.

This friendship was built on a shared interest in literature, in patronising the poor or socially oppressed who aspired to writing, in encouraging inoculation and in promoting Sunday schools. Eliza was interested particularly in the work of Ann Yearsley , but also in the letters of Ignatius Sancho . By early 1788 she was urging Wilmer Gossip onward in his developing patronage relationship with Yearsley, to follow up his letters by meeting her in person.Feeling that Hannah More 's treatment of Yearsley was a case of direct attempt by the strong to oppress the weak, she worked while still in her teens to raise 500 subscribers for Yearsley's second publication (Poems, on Various Subjects, 1786), corresponded with the poet for several years, kept her letters, and was rewarded with a verse compliment. She was, it seems, instrumental in persuading Yearsley, hitherto exclusively a poet, to embark on writing plays, and she campaigned vigorously to get these plays put on, suggesting Sarah Siddons in the lead of one of them.

On these travels Fletcher served as amanuensis to Appleton : his book Nile Journal, 1876, appeared as dictated to her, with illustrations by Eugene Benson ; his Syrian Sunshine followed the next year.

From the age of seventeen Mary Bosanquet had admired the women whom the primitive church made deaconesses because of their ministering work among the poor, and she resolved to model herself on their practical ministry. In her own house at Leytonstone, she and Ryan set about lodging strangers, bringing up children, relieving the afflicted and diligently following after every good work. They founded and ran an orphanage which later developed into a religious community. The number of orphans grew from six to thirty-five, and thirty-four adults (not all at the same time) shared the community. The children were cared for to improve their usually impaired health (we did not refuse either old or young on account of being sick or helpless), and were taught marketable skills. A few of the older girls, in rotation, would absent themselves from the classroom to work at cooking and housework. Because she was attempting something new, Bosanquet was bombarded with helpful advice about doing it differently: she was told, for instance, that she ought to engage in gainful work to secure the future of her undertaking. For her social works before as well as after marriage, she was seen by Bessie Rayner Parkes , half a century after her death, as the prototype of Victorian district visitors, tract distributors, Sunday-school teachers, and hospital nurses.

The first issue of the English Review, founded and edited by Ford Madox Hueffer (later FMF ), was published.

In 1904 he had a job in Germany as tutor to the children of novelist Elizabeth von Arnim .

She began to take holiday jobs: one at Marks and Spencer and one in a steam laundry, which was noisy, smelling of soap and disinfectant, where pay was deducted for every minute late in clocking in, and the toilets were disgusting. This paid ten shillings for a gruelling six-day week of eight hours a day, whereas Marks and Spencer paid twice that and offered good perks for a job in which the only drawback was crushing boredom. MF could not imagine how women could work at such jobs for life. In 1957 came her stint as an au pair in France.