After this LJL nursed her father through serious illness.

Having ended her schooling at sixteen, HL found a job as sub-editor on an Irish provincial paper, but she did not feel well qualified for this work, and instead got herself employed as a governess on the Continent (in Spain, Greece, Austria, France, and Italy), teaching English to the children of noble families.

Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton made a life for himself as both diplomat and writer. His first book of poems, Clytemnestra, The Earl's Return, The Artist, and Other Poems, appeared in 1855 under the pseudonym Owen Meredith. He followed this publication with several other books, including a popular verse novel Lucile (1860) and a collaborative project with Julian Fane , Tannhäuser (1861). His Fables in Song (1874) was well received but his posthumously published King Poppy (1892) is generally regarded as his best work. He also published an extensive biography of his father , but its narrative ends before his parents' acrimonious separation.

Rosina Bulwer turned to writing as a way of supporting herself. She often satirized her husband's works in her own.

Judith Cowper wrote most of her surviving poetry before she was married. Her work began to appear anonymously in print in 1721.

Her residence in this family may have been as some kind of upper servant.

STM apparently fought as a soldier in southern France, and was certainly chosen a Member of Parliament and a commissioner of taxes in Warwickshire, the centre of his family's property and influence. He also made a habit of criminal activity, evidently as part of feuding between one powerful noble family and another.

It seems that she herself may have held some position as official attendant on the two daughters of Thomas Wentworth, Lord Strafford , as well as doing lessons with them. Strafford, recently ennobled by his master Charles I , was growing in unpopularity and was to die on the scaffold in 1641. The Wentworth daughters were younger than JM by several years. She tells the young Lady Anne Wentworth : I am Yours, (since You gave me the liberty, to call my selfe so, when I had the Honour to bee admitted into the House of my Lord Your Father, where my Parents did introduce me.

As a doctor, BM had specialised in the treatment of hypochondriack and hysterick, that is nervous and psychiatric, disorders. After settling in England he became a writer as well: his first published work was a translation from French to English of Jean de La Fontaine , 1703.

In effect, she worked for the duchess as a humble companion. She left after a quarrel, apparently following some kind of involvement with the duchess's son by Charles II. DM later attacked Cleveland in fiction.

When her mother died, the adolescent Jane became the manager of the household and hostess for her father's entertaining of scientists, politicians, and intellectuals.

She helped, with her mother, to negotiate the Ladies' Peace of 1529. François made her his representative in foreign, domestic, and military affairs; she wielded power for nearly a decade until she clashed with him on the issue of the Protestant Reformation, after which he dropped her from his inner circle. His son Henri II was equally distrustful of her.

Someone called Marie de France (who may have been the writer so named) was appointed Abbess of the powerful nunnery at Shaftesbury in Dorset.

Despite her own skimpy education, she ran a periodical in London (which did not pay), as well as working for children's publisher John Newbery . She consulted about the periodical with the Duchess of Northumberland and Lord Lyttelton . Her longer-term employment was as a teacher, who took male pupils (including a nephew) to educate in her own home. Her Series of Letters includes letters she addressed to, apparently, two different ex-pupils: a fourteen-year-old who went on from her care to an academy in England, and a seventeen-year-old (in October 1787) whose own letters call her Mother, from the motherly attention she paid him while under her care.

Before her move to London she was running some little concern, presumably a business. She mentions that God visited her with affliction from an early age, but does not specify whether this affected her health, finances, or emotional life.

Before her marriage Eliza Kirkham Strong (later EKM ) worked as a teacher in a girls' school at Swansea in South Wales.

As well as this editorial venture and her large output of novels, she worked hard as a contributor to magazines.

HM wrote several plays and farces. He co-founded Punch (the second periodical he originated), and served a short term as its joint-editor. He published extensively, including historical, religious, literary, and educational works, but largely made his mark penning compassionate accounts of Britain's lower classes.

Despite having asthma and her parents wanting her to be a stay-at-home daughter, FMM aspired to become an actress after she discovered her natural aptitude for drama in two high-school productions. The teenage girl, with very dark hair and blue eyes, developed an early notion that she would be socially successful, owing to her arrestingly mobile face as well as a delicate, appealingly eager and vivacious demeanour, which gave her a more dominant appearance than her twin although she was the younger. Her facial features and physique, as is revealed in her correspondence with Alice, were recognised as those of an ideal beauty among her closest friends at Cambridge. But attractiveness alone did not ensure her the luck or talent to succeed in the theatre.

CMC was selling theatre tickets in Twickenham and Richmond, both just outside London, as a means of supporting herself.

Shortly before and after this marriage, MMC taught first at Bard College and then at Sarah Lawrence College , both in the state of New York.

She supported her writing by whatever casual jobs she could get, as a waitress, an accompanist, an office junior, and dog-walking in Riverside Park. She took pride in the fact that she never resigned from a job but was always fired. In August 1935, back in Columbus for the summer, she worked on the Columbus Ledger. After the USA entered the second world war, she tried unsuccessfully to find employment as a war correspondent.

The first job held by Medbh McCaughan (later MMG ) was teaching English, at her own old school, the Dominican Convent at Fort William Park, Belfast.