The Unitarians were a prominent community in Manchester. As a minister's wife, EG was counted on to be an example of propriety and charity to her husband's congregation and a leader among its women. She was also expected to teach Sunday School, and to visit the poor. However, she was ambivalent about her new role—teaching at Sunday School she willingly undertook, but she refused to mediate in disputes or to deal with gossip among the church congregation.

He made her his personal messenger to correspondents in Spain and France.

HW 's mother found her a job teaching music to young ladies at a Bayswater school. This job ended when the French teacher accused her of being une fille—which might imply lesbian behaviour or merely coquetry. Since the family finances demanded that, at not yet fourteen, she should be earning, she then travelled to Newcastle to teach music at a boarding school, Ketridge House . She waxes eloquent about the drudgery of teaching: being nailed to my chair for hours, listening to dull piano pieces or to the croak of vile French in broad Scotch accents; to teach the verbs avoir and être from fifteen to fifty years of age, and then to retire . . . to a work house. She says she could have gone on stage instead with her mother's approval, but her father would not allow it.

Years later she told the Royal Literary Fund that as a young lady she used to read aloud to Lady Charlotte Finch (1725-96), who in old age was blind.

DW began her first teaching job, at DissHigh School (which became a grammar school with the 1944 Education Act). She had already accepted this post when she was offered one nearer Oxford, which at the time she would have chosen.

For the next several years HW lived at home with her stepmother, as was expected of a middle-class young woman. She made herself an independent publishing scholar during this time and kept up a busy scholarly correspondence—though Felicitas Corrigan regards her as cut off for ten years of her youth from human friendship and the arts, and says she underwent at the hands of her stepmother a spiritual ascesis as searing and formative as that of any Desert Father.

KT began working three or four days a week at the Dublin head office of the newly founded Irish Ladies' Land League , writing and addressing letters to members of Parliament.

CMT took on the care of her widowed brother Robert 's three children.

By the age of sixteen, UT had begun receiving commissions for her sculptures and had rented a studio of her own in which to exhibit her works. The money she earned from these commissions gave her some independence from her family. The Royal College of Art displayed her 1907 sculpture of the ballerina Adeline Genée . Around 1909 she was listed in the Dictionary of British Artists. In 1913 she sculpted Nijinsky in the role of Debussy 's Faun. This work was exhibited in an international exhibition held at Venice in 1914. She gave up sculpture soon after this, though she did a last piece in 1917, a bust of her lover Radclyffe Hall . Many years later, in 1954, the ex-ballerina Lydia Sokolova found UT 's bust of Nijinsky in a second-hand shop in Cecil Court, St Martin's Lane, and it then went on display at the London Diaghilev Exhibition from October 1954 to January 1955.

In 1828FT grew acquainted with Joseph Dorfeuille , a French naturalist and the curator of the Western Museum of Cincinnati , whose collection of Indian artefacts and other local and natural interests struck her fancy. Unfortunately, the rest of the population in Cincinnati did not share her enthusiasm, and though a small collection of wax figures garnered it some attention, the museum was quickly going bankrupt.FT , eager to make some money and help out her new acquaintance, proposed that Dorfeuille should develop a new attraction; an oracle, an Invisible Girl, to which visitors could put questions, and who would respond in various languages. This proposal allowed FT to create employment for her son, who would do the speaking, and Hervieu , who would make the decorations. The oracle was a sensation, allowing the museum to remain open, and providing FT and her companions with desperately needed funds.

VT made her theatrical debut at not yet twenty, performing the namesake role of Viola in her father 's production of Twelfth Night at the Theatre Royal in Edinburgh.

From the age of five Mary Stephens Davies (later Mary Wells, then LS ) acted in children's roles in Birmingham: she made her debut as one of the little princes in the Tower in Shakespeare 's Richard III. The manager Richard Yates was an early fosterer of her career. After visiting London and impressing David Garrick (she says), she played in various provincial theatres.

In 1919 she got a job as a part-time secretary with Scotland Yard . When her superior noticed her typing a court report full of four-letter words he chivalrously took it away from her and gave it to a male member of staff instead.

After school and the domestic science course, NS worked at Woolwich Arsenal during the first world war, making munitions and living among urban working-class people who were then quite strange to her.

Living in London, CSJ became by 1899 secretary to Lady Randolph Churchill and her son Winston . She was at this point also beginning work on her first novel.

After taking her teaching diploma, Mary Rainbow (later MS ) searched for a position, but these proved difficult to find. In 1939 she accepted a post at an elementary school on a council estate (that is, of subsidized housing) at Middlesbrough in Yorkshire, where she taught arithmetic, sewing, and music. The winter of 1939-40 was difficult for her. She calls it a tough year, so tough that the outbreak of war just seems a part of the cold, the strain of teaching subjects I wasn't trained in, the poor food, the poverty, and the fear of air raids.. Until air-raid shelters could be built at the school, classes were taught in nearby homes. This was fun and informal, but required each lesson . . . to be taught four times, to four small groups, and this for MS was a real trial.

She was now free to pursue her mathematical studies with increased intensity. She tackled plane and spherical trigonometry and conic sections, read Newton 's Principia, and began to explore higher mathematics and physical astronomy. Many of her relatives protested about the nature of her study, but she found support among Scotland's young Whigs, some of whom had lobbied for the higher education of women in the Edinburgh Review.

At this stage of her life ES intended to be a painter. She exhibited at Cork and (after initial rejection) in Dublin.

During the 1860s, ES devoted much of her time and energy to nursing a number of ailing family members and friends.

After leaving her school at Bath, ES , along with her sister Ellen, undertook the responsibility of educating her younger sisters at home.

She, who had never left the house alone or paid a bill, was now responsible for her husband's finances as well as her own, for entertaining lavishly without running in debt, and for chaperoning unmarried women older than she was. She also branched out, running subscription dances to raise money for the Hoxton Babies' Home founded by William Pett Ridge .

Involved—with his brother , William Holman Hunt , John Everett Millais , and others—in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 's critique of the reigning artistic principles and values, DGR has subsequently become one of the most renowned practitioners of the school, particularly for his often larger-than-life images of women, that challenged conventional painterly techniques and ideals of beauty. His career was furthered by both Barbara Leigh Smith and John Ruskin .