ER 's interest in art started early in life. She began drawing at the age of eight and, at her death, left over two thousand works. Her practical experience and wide exposure to art gave her a good foundation for her future as an art historian.

D. A. Thomas , at his wife 's suggestion, invited his daughter, Margaret Haig Mackworth (later MHVR ), to work as his highly confidential secretary and . . . right-hand man in 1913 at a salary of £1,000 a year. He treated her as his confidante, and taught her the arts of corporate dealing and bluffing. She learned quickly and excelled in the business world.

On leaving school RR began working locally as a feature writer and reporter for the Chigwell Times when she left school.

BP worked briefly as a governess at Katowice, Poland, before the worsening political situation necessitated her return to England.

As a young woman SP was a remarkable visual artist. In 2007 appeared two books discussing her work. Kathleen Connors and Sally Bayley brought together a volume of critical essays in Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath's Art of the Visual, while Donald Friedman in The Writer's Brush (covering a range of authors from different periods) discussed particularly a striking and doom-laden Plath self-portrait done at the age of nineteen, and reproduced on his cover her lively, colourful, modernist Two Women Reading.

HP joined a touring theatre company run by Anew McMaster (Mac), an Irish actor-manager.

Having left school in the earlier years of the Second World War and already worked at various jobs including one in an aircraft factory, Pam Price (later PG) served in the Women's Royal Navy Service or Wrens.

During this period she added film to stage performance in it droppeth as the gentle rain, a surrealist work by Albie Thoms (who was later an avant-garde film-maker of some fame). Designed to be shown as part of a festival of the absurd along with various well-known plays, the film was banned at the last moment for using bad language, but Greer forwarded her theatrical reputation by appearing in more than one of the plays (and painting scenery). Later she undertook the name role in Brecht 's Mother Courage.

Her family's financial difficultes prompted CH to support herself from an early age. In 1890 she left school and worked as a student teacher in the Midlands, and then began acting in provincial theatre, playing melodramatic and Shakespearean roles in little-known touring companies. Around 1903 she stopped touring and began to make a living writing pulp fiction and light journalism, often for women's magazines.

Mary Agnes Adamson had little help from college authorities over the choice of a career, since she did not want to teach. Neither did she want to do office work or become a temperance organiser.

According to Ann, the Kemble family apprenticed her to a dressmaker or milliner, but no evidence has been found.

EH began her career as an actress at the Smock Alley Theatre (or Theatre Royal) in Dublin.

When Jutta of Spanheim died, Hildegarde was unanimously chosen as the new leader of the women's religious community attached to the Benedictine monastery at Disibodenberg.

In 1853, also during her first marriage, FSH began her literary career, writing art reviews and articles for the Freeman's Journal and the Nation.

FH was a musician before she was a writer. She was performing for family guests by 1798, when her father's diary says a great deal about her ability, and mentions her being the principal performer at an evening of Mozart and Haydn . She composed the music for her father's melo-drameThe Lady of the Rock, 1805 (whose story came from a travel guide to Scotland written by Sarah Murray ).

WH spent the year between leaving school and beginning university working as a probationary nurse in a private nursing home in London. She considered this job to be part of the war effort: her employment allowed an experienced nurse to be made available for foreign service. She described her work as cleaning sterilisers and doing any job I was told to, from holding limbs for operations to disposing of unwelcome visitors.She was paid ¥18 for the year.

After her mother's death, Zora was sent to live with one of her brothers in Jacksonville, Florida. For several years she moved between there and Eatonville, working as a maid and later joining a travelling musical troupe as a wardrobe assistant.

The day after their second wedding ceremony the married pair travelled by coach to Bristol, where Joseph was engaged to act the title role in King Lear. The production was delayed because he was ill.

After she left school at fifteen and her mother emigrated to America, NJ became a pupil-teacher at a church school in Middlesbrough at a salary of twelve pounds a year. She boarded in the house of some church people, and was miserable, lonely, and poor. The children, even poorer, were many of them barefoot and dirty; she felt the discipline was far too rigid and the teaching dominated by the learning of lists. She became a good teacher, she felt, by refusing to do it in the way that was expected of her. But even this did not exempt her from constant criticism of her personal demeanour and habits (her smoking, for instance, was disapproved as unsexed). Once properly certificated she earned something like £70 a year with annual increments of five pounds.

After her sister 's marriage and departure for India, GJ nursed her father and managed the household until his death in 1840. As her father's primary care-giver during the last years of his life, she was left feeling alone and without direction on his death.

EJ was about eleven when her stepfather decided she should be put to work in a factory as a power-loom weaver.

PHJ worked at the London office of the Central Hanover Bank and Trust Company (based in New York). She said her stenographer's post was that of The Junior.

After her years caring for her brother's small children, AK took on the analogous task of looking after her father, who was now incapacitated by illness, until he died in 1856. (A fear that he might be about to die had dawned on his family during her childhood.) She later did the same for her mother.

JK first found work as a journalist in Bulgaria. She has later become a linguist, academic teacher, and literary theorist.