MJJ managed her father's household and cared for her five younger siblings for thirteen years. Her household responsibilities prevented her from reading or writing during the day, so she was forced to pursue her literary aspirations at night. Writing to her friend Felicia Hemans , she described the challenges of her early adulthood: my life after eighteen became so painful, laboriously domestic, that it was an absolute duty to crush intellectual tastes.

PJ 's literary career, which was highly performative, was likely launched by a reading in Toronto in early 1892 of A Cry from an Indian Wife.

She may have worked as a governess.

By mid-1734, EJ , in debt because of her divorced husband 's failure to pay her maintenance, took a job as governess to the three daughters of Hill Evans , a British merchant who lived and traded in St Petersburg. She negotiated her salary up from fourteen to twenty pounds a year, and she represents herself as having been a great success as a governess. Among the texts she used with the children were hymns for morning and evening by Bishop Thomas Ken .

Living with a painter, she too took up painting, and had an exhibition in London in 1935.

Nevertheless she was constantly painting, pursuing her ambition to be an artist. She also worked for the Labour Party . During the 1970s she worked as a home tutor for the Inner London Education Authority or ILEA and began her career as a journalist (initially as a reviewer for the Evening Standard). For two years at the end of this decade she was a committee member and panelist for South-East Arts . She sits (with her sister Antonia, her daughter, and other relations) as a patron of the Frank Longford Charitable Trust

AK , aged nineteen, sang professionally for the first time, in a concert featuring music by Handel ; she was too nervous to do herself justice.

From the time she was eight years old, MTK worked as an actress, helping to supplement the family's income after her father's death in 1787. She played numerous minor parts as a child, landed more prominent roles after the age of twelve, and eventually became a celebrated actress, earning a comfortable living from her profession.

As a music student FK had served as page-turner to some famous pianists performing at the Crystal Palace. After abandoning her concert performance ambitions she continued to play the organ for temperance or co-operative musical festivals (started at the Crystal Palace by Edward Owen Greening ), and sometimes arranged music for choirs. She became a music teacher at the Chapel Royal in St James's Palace. She also launched a career in journalism, both as writer and editor, working for James Bowden of Ward, Lock and Bowden on several different magazines, as well as for the Bible Society and the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society . Her most famous editorship was that of the Girl's Own Paper, from 1908. Although she had been warned off music on grounds of a weak heart, she did well in journalism, which as she wrote herself makes a very great demand on physical health, what with irregular food, irregular sleep, and long-distance travelling.

LCL was an amateur artist of real ability. One of her emblematic designs was engraved as a frontispiece to A Christian Wreath for the Pagan Deities, 1820, a pedagogic work on Greek and Roman mythology by her former teacher Frances Arabella Rowden . A sketchbook belonging to Lady Julia Conyers including work by LCL sold in the Peyraud auction in 2009 for US $56,120. Lamb's contributions include a portrait of her husband and more disturbing images: a recumbent woman being stabbed through the heart by a Cupid and a skeleton acting together, another woman on a rocky coast, clasping two children while a third drowns and supernatural figures gaze malevolently down.

Her biographer Susanne Woods suggests that AL may have been employed to teach music to the countess's daughter, the future diarist Lady Anne Clifford .

PL became urban district librarian for the town of Wellington in Shropshire, having graduated BA, failed the entrance exam for the Civil Service , and been ordered by the Ministry of Defence to take up some kind of war work.

Having worked on, and written for, university publications as a student, Peggy Wemyss found employment on graduating, first with the Westerner (a Communist paper of whose politics she remained unaware), then for the new Winnipeg Citizen, Canada's only co-operative daily. She wrote reviews, labour news, and a radio column.

While working on her doctorate, ML taught French for two years at the Loreto Convent School where she had previously been a pupil herself.

WL then worked as a tutor in the Gibbon family, finding a mediocre pupil in Edward (who grew up to be the father of the historian Edward Gibbon ) but a bright and rewarding pupil in Edward's sister Hester (whom he was not paid to teach).

DHL became a clerk at a surgical supplies factory.

John Pordage died; after this JL took on the leadership of his congregation.

From 1787 ML became the local medical practitioner in succession to her aunt.

If it is true that one of the Lee daughters appeared on stage once or twice as a child, then Harriet is a possible candidate.

When in 1946 RL 's brother John set up his own publishing firm, John Lehmann Limited , she became a shareholder and director, and also reader and consultant, until the company collapsed in late 1952.

At eighteen, Doris moved to Salisbury (now Harare). There she worked in a variety of jobs: as, for instance, a nursemaid, a telephone operator, and a clerical worker.

DL did war work as a nurse in various London hospitals.

During her early, drifting years AL worked designing woven textiles, but realised in about ten minutes that designing was not for her. She worked as an assistant buyer for various shops, then worked in the wardrobe department of the BBC and then the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden . She was then a receptionist at a family-planning clinic. She began writing during her City Lit course, devoting to it one day a week.

On leaving school DL went to work as an usherette at the Gate Cinema in Notting Hill, a bohemian hub where [a]ll the staff were literature graduates, or going off to art or drama school. It was Derek Jarman who recommended her to enroll at Dartington College of Arts . While she was studying there by day she worked by night as a performer.