JF became a journalist before her marriage, while she was still in her teens.

At Bilney EF set out to control her own financial affairs by turning the estate to profit. She decided to turn her attention To Farmeing and to seek my fortune for my Bread.

MF became the official hostess at the government house, Bombay, after her mother went back to England to rejoin her younger children.

JAF initially followed in his brother's footsteps at Oxford , joining the Oxford Movement, assisting John Henry Newman with his Lives of the English Saints, and taking orders as a Deacon.

RF worked as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

She wanted to be a journalist, but was rejected for the first job she applied for, on the Church Times (whose editor was then Rosamund Essex ). She was taken on as secretary to a BBC producer, then in 1956 became a feature writer for Truth magazine as well as a contributor, on free-lance terms, to the Guardian. Two years later she was appointed correspondent on religion for the Spectator and she became a columnist for the Daily Mail, which paid her the then excellent salary of £6,000 per annum. In 1974 she became a producer of religious programmes for the BBC .

MW held several governess posts, one of which she describes to her sister as a noisom irksom Den.

She wrote a vigorous self-defence to a censorious aunt who reproved her for rambling about the country on foot.

SW made her first appearance on the London stage.

According to her own statement she spent seven years (up to the age of twenty-four) as a servant to an employer in the nobility. Scholar John Considine in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography identifies this employer as Anne, Lady Maynard , of Little Easton in Essex, who died in 1647. Diane Purkiss names her as Maynard's daughter Anne Wroth , wife of Sir Henry Wroth. This family were royalists, and HW once cooked for Charles I.

JSW became the first president of the all-female Writers' Club .

The Bellmont family on whom Frado was dumped in the novel took the relationship to be one of indentured labour, to last until the age of eighteen. At six years old she fed the hens, drove the cows to and from the pasture, did all the family washing-up (standing on a stool to reach the sink), and brought in firewood, all to the accompaniment of blows and verbal abuse. As she grew, extra duties were added. From a very early age she was set to work that was physically too hard for her.

When she was first in London AW found plenty to occupy her, both activities undertaken for interest and those undertaken for earnings to support herself and her father. She became an assistant to Zachary Williams in his experiments with the magnetic compass, and to a more successful scientist, Stephen Gray , who was also a Charterhouse resident. Gray (who came from a family of blacksmiths and began life as a dyer) carried out the first experiments with electrical conductivity, introduced an improved understanding of what electricity is, and won the gold Copley medal from the Royal Society for his work. William Stukeley , FRS, called him the father, at least first propagator, of electricity.Under Gray's guidance Williams became a scientist.

In 1846, she made her first submission to the Nation. Over the next few years she published poems and leaders anonymously or as Speranza.

In New York she tried her hand at patronage. A young woman from Chicago lived in her home for seven years before going on to be a journalist in France and to flourish in various ways. Another young woman from a distant city, who was invited and given a reception, turned out ungrateful and believed false rumours against EWW (who describes New York literary society as something of a snake pit).

DW signed up during World War One as a nurse with the Red Cross . She proved, however, too emotional to be a success at nursing. Years later she confessed that she had fainted at operations, cried when the patients cried.

When she was purchased as a slave, her age was judged by missing baby teeth.

EW was already writing during the 1930s, when she also travelled throughout rural Mississippi taking photographs. Her father was passionate about photography, and this passion would survive through Eudora. Her subjects were mostly people, black and white, living in shocking poverty. Some of these photos appeared in Life magazine, and a number were seen in a one-woman show in New York. Welty was hoping to publish a book of her photographs, but as her writing career developed her photography became less central to her, and the book did not appear until 1971.

As well as laying out gardens and commissioning artwork, DW was therefore something of a literary patron.

Mary took over maternal and household responsibilities when her mother was incapacitated, and had to relinquish them when her mother recovered. She then withdrew a little from the family, rather as her mother had previously done.

By working as a teacher of small girls she supported herself and her mother, and after her mother's death herself alone. She was teaching French to a few pupils in 1807.

Three months after her father's death EW was working as a servant for a family whose ungodliness made her unhappy. She stayed with them only in obedience to her mother. A year after this, on 6 April 1701, she was resolved to leave them soon.