HW gives a hair-raising account of her first interview for a school-teaching job (which she turned down). At past thirty she started a school with her sister in London. By 1798 she had given it up and was seeking a job as a family governess. She was indignant that a governess should be expected to eat at the steward's table, and noted that a male tutor would be treated with more respect. A decade later she did some research in Yorkshire for a suitable building in which to start a Protestant nunnery.

SW began writing fiction as she waited, after completing her PhD degree, to hear whether or not she had got a grant which would have enabled her to continue in the academic profession. Since then she has held academic jobs, as a lecturer with the Open University and a tutor on creative writing courses, and has also worked, before the success of her novels, in a bookshop and as a public library assistant. By 2017 she had made cameo appearances in all but one of her four novels adapted for tv.

As a widow Mary Rich was responsible for a good deal of family business: arranging marriages for three nieces of her husband, and administering his will. She was admired throughout her neighbourhood for charity and benevolence.

JW found herself a governess position after her father's death. On 24 January 1750 John Mulso reported that she had a new post with a Lady Sherrard at Hampton Court, where he looked forward to visiting her. During her illness at the end of this year, Hester Mulso was already looking for a new position for her, and in less than a year she took up a job with the family of Dr Sneyd . Then in1753 she went to work for the family of William Thoyts . The two little Thoyt girls, born in 1747 and 1749, in due course became the Two Young Married Ladies to whom JW addressed her conduct book.

EW seems to have been a teacher: she refers to her education of youth as well as to her ordinary businesse in governing my family (which would mean her household: servants as well as relations).

For many years ALW visited the prisoners in the Bridewell Prison at Horfield, near Bristol, and worked with the Discharged Prisoners Aid Society . She compared her charity work to watching by a filthy gutter to pick out a jewel here and there, as the foul stream flows by. Although this sounds as if the majority of prisoners constituted the filth, she also said that she felt the soul of a man, however stained and degraded . . . could be restored to its proper beauty and worth.

Before she was fifteen, Ann had been set up in business with her sister (a business which apparently did not flourish) and had earned some money (it would not be much) doing plain work sewing. After the brothel experience she began sewing shirts, as an assistant to a chamber-milliner. Her ability to make any kind of living seems throughout her story to depend on finding patronage from relatives or connections.

Not long after her conversion JV became a Quaker minister and missionary. She and her sister Jane Sansom became local leaders of the movement, strong supporters of the women's meetings which in the later 1670s came under attack as the Society of Friends moved away from its former radicalism.

Here she seems very quickly to have set herself on the path to unusual independence. She began writing and publishing the kind of socially-based verse and prose which was the delight of fashionable Paris.

MV taught Sunday-school and was successful with her pupils, but gave up teaching after the arrival of a new clergyman whose views differed significantly from her own.

Nor is anything known of her early life abroad except that her father 's position in Jerusalem led to the publication of SV 's first book, Views in Central Abyssinia, apparently through Bishop Samuel Gobat .

Along with three of her sisters, Henrietta Keddie (later ST ) founded a school in Cupar, the Scottish town of their birth, where they instructed the daughters of local professionals and farmers.

JT worked for the Foreign Office for two years from 1965. Her work there concerned China's relations with African and other Third World countries. She then became a teacher. She has taught English literature to children from the age of ten to Advanced Level (sixteen to eighteen) and to adults, besides English as a second language. She enjoyed her subject and her students, but not educational institutions. She began writing as a sideline while teaching.

IT played the part of the nun for Max Reinhardt 's American tour of his play The Miracle.

RT 's visible ministry in London belongs to the years 1659-61. Her co-religionists trusted her to persuade Joan Whitrow to submit the manuscript of a proposed publication to their committee according to their regulations. She preached and served as a minister and prison visitor for the Society of Friends (and was imprisoned herself for speaking up for those already in prison), helped to oversee the Society's publication of texts, dispensed charity, and entertained visitors from outside London.

She became increasingly committed to good works, like teaching deaf children and working for reform of factory working conditions.

According to the Gentleman's Magazine, EST had to set aside her own interests to serve as governess to the innumerable younger children in the family. The same article asserted that for the last seven years of her father's life (that is from 1798) she actually superintended his legal work. This seems to imply that she directed an office of legal clerks.

After this period ET 's prospects improved, to include employment, social life, and Honourable Friendship, but then another dark cloud intervened. At the time of publication she was working hard, since she spent the week looking forward to the heavenly rest of Sunday. Her status was difficult to categorise, since on alternate days she was a mistress (teaching ladies elegant Writing and Accounts) and a servant (keeping the accounts of a shop). Another of her jobs during the 1690s was working for John Dunton as one of his stable of regular periodical contributors (many of whom were women, including Elizabeth Singer, later Rowe ).

She spent the last three years before her marriage living, presumably as a paid companion, with Lady Chambers , widow of Sir Robert Chambers who had been a judge in India. Lady Chambers took Annie on although her elder sister had been employed in the same way, and had eloped.

AT led an active life in her youth. She was a good rider, who swam a mare across the river at Middleham (ten miles from Richmond in Yorkshire). She also practised medicine informally.