Soon after suffering her miscarriage, FAS was forced by her husband's illness to attend to a crisis in his office involving some misappropriation of funds. The resulting crash course in administration stood her in good stead as her own career in India developed. At the same time, organizing a ball, a concert, and a stage production for the British hill station at Dalhousie brought her into contact with the local native population (from whom she wanted to commission work on curtains, footlights, and so on). She realised how inadequate was the pidgin speech used by British employers and servants for communication, and set about learning Indian languages properly. This laid the foundation for her interest in Indian culture. Back in India after the home leave during which she had taken her baby daughter to England, she began doctoring . . . the women and children of Kasur. Her reputation was quickly established when she saved a young woman with puerperal fever, whose husband's previous wives had all died in childbirth.

Throughout these adventurous years, however, she was also occupied in nursing relations who were ill.

After university he seems to have worked in a secretarial capacity for various great men before settling as private secretary to Arthur, Lord Grey of Wilton , in 1580. Grey's top appointment in Ireland that year placed Spenser in the Irish civil service. His salary at the end of 1580 was twenty pounds, plus various perks. He went on to hold a range of highly responsible positions in Ireland.

As a child GS sometimes modelled with her siblings for her father's illustrations. His Afternoon Tea, 1880, shows her at the age of four, posing with her elder brother and sister. In her teens she was singled out by her father (in preference to her elder sister) to entertain his business guests in the drawing-room, a duty she hated.

JS found work as a servant, and at other times as a farm labourer or upholsterer.

As an undergraduate ZS already hoped one day to make her living through the noble art of literature. Though she felt compelled to disguise her ambition with a joke, it came true with remarkable speed. She was appointed in February 2000 (the month after her first book appeared) writer-in-residence at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London. In 2002-3 she was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in the USA, where she enjoyed herself teaching all of her favourite books.

By 1922, after a brief spell in an engineering firm, she was working as a secretary at Pearson and Newnes publishing firm, a job she kept for thirty years. She never considered changing jobs. Her boss, Sir Neville Pearson , appears lightly disguised in her first two novels; he was a lodestar in [her] disordered existence. Her work did not use up [her] whole energy, and this was the way she wanted it. She gave up her job after her attempted suicide in 1953.

She worked as amanuensis or secretary to her father, and later became a freelance research assistant, as well as a scholarly writer on her own account.

From the age of fourteen until his death in 1835, CS served as her father's secretary, a position she combined with her own early work as an author.

With her friend Mary Hamilton , EJS operated a successful shirt and collar manufacturing co-operative business at 68 Dean Street in Soho.

At the time of the first move she felt she had turned her life around. For half a year she held a job as a shorthand-typist, and otherwise she worked at becoming a writer.

KS taught variously at Hamilton College and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Owing to her father's financial crisis of 1817, MS obtained employment as a governess (that is in later terminology a teacher) for a short period of time at a school in Essex.

After getting her degree, EJS worked as a secretary in London. One of her employers was Ellis Roberts , literary editor of Time and Tide. As a poet she pursued her course undistracted by any search for popularity—joined no groups, gave no poetry readings (until once at the very end of her life).

As soon as she had a house she began taking in children of friends from the East on their holidays and the children, by his first marriage, of her brother who was now in America. This caring for children brought in some income while ES continued writing and looked for a publisher.

Members of the Union of Democratic Control also included Margaret Llewelyn Davies and Bertrand Russell . Helena M. Swanwick was a member of the Executive Committee, and LMS was one of twelve women besides her on its General Council.

At this date, a census report tells us, JMR still thought of himself as a civil engineer, though according to independent scholar Dick Collins he seems not to have had formal training, and doesn't appear in any professional register.

Madeline Bradley first began acting on the Londonstage at fourteen, when she played Queen of the Fairies in a Christmas pantomime. Early in her career, she adopted the stage name Madeleine Lucette. She went on to tour the British Isles with opera companies, including McCaull's Comic Opera Company and the company which became the famous D'Oyly Carte.

Having begun to publish in the 1830s, when he became a champion of J. W. Turner against established styles of painting, JR made his name and created a sensation with the appearance of the first volume of Modern Painters in 1843. He became a leading art critic and patron of the arts, having a major influence on the Pre-Raphaelite movement, including its women. His generous attempts to foster Elizabeth Siddal 's painterly ambition were ended by her death, and he acted as a patron to Dante Gabriel Rossetti , her future husband, but he also crushed Anna Mary Howitt 's aspirations after she sought his opinion on her work.

Although she left university without any further qualification in education, BR became a teacher. Her first job was at the prestigiousHandsworth Grammar School , a school for boys in a poor area of Birmingham.

ESR as a young woman was fairly serious about her painting as well as writing. Her paintings include landscapes and portraits, the latter both of living subjects and of fictitious figures like the muses and an Amazon.

On leaving the St Quintins' school FAR became a governess. Her employers included, for several years, Lord Bessborough (one of whose children was the future Lady Caroline Lamb ).

In CalcuttaER took up her literary ambitions again, and found herself work in local journalism as both writer and editor. She continued to pursue this career after her return to England a year later.

As they reached adulthood, ATR and her sister came increasingly to compensate for their father's lack of a wife. Even as children, Anne recalled, he always talked to us very gravely as if we were grown up women. He took them into his confidence early on about money matters, as is evident when Anne jovially notes in a letter of 1856: One thing keeps us at home is that Pa aint got no money. He referred to them as his 2 little wives and neither of them married until after his death. Anne herself acted not just socially but professionally on her father's behalf, becoming Thackeray 's secretary and amanuensisfrom 1851 until he died.