Anna was educated by Miss Yokeley , a governess, who taught her French. After the departure of Miss Yokeley, some time between 1803 and 1806, Anna acted as governess to her sisters. She also taught herself Italian and Spanish. She excelled at writing poetry and prose, and at sketching, encouraged in the latter by her father. Writers she mentioned enjoying in childhood included Shakespeare , Wordsworth , and Anna Letitia Barbauld . Later in her life, her musical ability became known to her friends in Canada, as she took with her the guitar she purchased with the money she received from the sale of an early piece of writing.

Her sisters, like her, remained unmarried and became governesses, all except one who married a man named James Brock , who died in 1859. The unmarried sisters were all dead by 1878.

AMH was an extremely prolific writer whose literary career spanned the pre- and later Victorian periods. She wrote many stories, nine novels, some children's literature, three plays, a pamphlet, and a travel book. She also worked as an editor and wrote several pieces in support of the temperance movement. Her fiction participated in mid-century debates over the plight of governesses and the position of women generally. Much of her work served to sustain stereotypes of Irish national character.

CB , who had never been away from home, found adjusting to school difficult. She was recognized as clever on entrance, and like her eldest sister was trained for work as a governess. Her sister Emily arrived in November.

Perhaps the most famous governess of all time, AL is better known as Anna of The King and I than for her literary achievements. She was an enterprising and independent world traveller—arguably a Victorian example of a hybrid colonial subjectivity—whose fictionalised memoirs and stories based on her time in Siam received substantial attention in her lifetime. Admired in their time for their anti-slavery rhetoric, they have recently drawn attention to the complex relationship between European women and empire. A public speaker, AL also produced other travel writing, journalism, and art criticism.

The orphaned protagonist, left entirely alone in an unfriendly world, is the only child of two orphaned only children. She works as a governess and a lady's maid, and is left about to marry a poor curate. This sounds like an early version of The Memoirs of a Femme de Chambre, which Blessington published in 1846.

At WeymouthEH (while her family moved to the village of Upwey) attended Ma'am Tucker's school, first boarding with a neighbour and later at the school. The governess was a Presbyterian, for which reason Bunyan 's Pilgrim's Progress was read aloud in the evenings, with commentary which was less enjoyable than the book. Elizabeth's mother took her away from this school, with ill feeling on both sides, because she was making no progress in needlework.

SL , an obscure woman publishing in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century, is known only by two texts: a book about gender issues and women's moral influence for good, and an article that sought to raise the status of governesses.

After moving to Hampstead in 1841, Fanny Braddon employed Miss Parrot as a governess for Mary Elizabeth, who also took lessons at a local day school. Between 1843 and 1844, her mother personally taught her, with special attention to music.

The three Challoner sisters, Nan, Phillis, and Dulce, who live in a comfortable, gentrified cottage with their rather helpless and dependent widowed mother, discover that they are just like other girls (not well enough educated to become governesses) after the unfortunate investments made by their late father land the family in poverty. They dislike the idea of working as companions, since that would separate them. They become unlike other girls by resolving to exploit their talent for making their own clothes by setting up in business as dressmakers, although this will be regarded by their neighbours as a sad step down the social ladder. (Carrying parcels, for instance, is something that a lady is not supposed to do.) Their plight is particularly hard on Nan, who is being courted by their neighbour Richard Mayne, an only child who has grown up with them like a brother, but whose father has privately set his face against Dick's marrying Nan on the grounds that he might end up supporting the whole Challoner family. Nevertheless, the girls pursue their intention, and by the end of the novel the future looks bright for Nan and Dick, as well as for the others.

After finishing their formal schooling, Sydney Owenson and her sister joined her father, and the family moved to Kilkenny—which she hyperbolically described as the Versailles of Ireland—meaning, presumably, that it rivalled the capital in wealth and culture. Her father established a theatre there, but soon went bankrupt and began touring the provinces, taking his daughters with him, and ending up in Sligo, a lively garrison town where the family had relations. Sydney's first-hand knowledge of Irish geography increased over the next few years, with governess jobs that took her to Westmeath and Tipperary, and to Derry, for another spell with her father.

WP 's Evangelical Anglican parents never frightened their children with talk of hell-fire, though from their nurse and the books read aloud by their governess she and her siblings imbibed a fear of damnation and a virulent anti-Catholicism. They used to rush around the garden crying: To Hell with the Pope! and Up with Wycliffe ! Later a great-aunt and her daughter, representatives of Ulster Protestantism , introduced Winifred and her sister to the concepts of original sin and the wrath of God.

The Englefield house, the first that AB remembered in detail, was surrounded by country full of wild-life and plants. The children went riding in Windsor Great Park every day: one governess remarked with bitterness that the children were apparently kept to exercise the horses, instead of the other way round.AB later remembered that the beauty of Windsor Park drove deep into me, filling me with delight and with an intense desire to find words to express what I saw.

Frances Lavinia Rossetti was the English-born half-Italian daughter of Italian refugee Gaetano Polidori , a teacher and translator who had once been secretary to the Italian dramatist and poet Vittorio Alfieri . She was seventeen years younger than her husband, marrying him when she was nearly twenty-six and he forty-three, and she had been earning her living as a governess.

OS went to be a governess at Barkly East, thirty miles north-east of Cradock; she was too upset by family disruptions to fulfil her duties, and left after several weeks.

Though the Feminist Companion says that Miss Silver is a character [i]n the mould of Agatha Christie 's Miss Marple, she actually predates Miss Marple by two years. She is a former governess who now runs her own detective agency, expending much of her professional earnings on the needs of others. She is formidably clever, but given a piquant unlikeliness in the role of detective by her old-lady appearance and her strict moral sense—which, however, often leads her to form judgements divergent from those of others. She sees straight through condescension and personal pretence. Like other fictional female sleuths (and indeed like actual women writers reporting human affairs), she is quick to exploit specifically feminine knowledge and understanding, and she has the gift of putting anxious clients at ease (particularly those to whom when they were children a governess represented the principle of security). Her love of quoting Tennyson signifies her membership in an earlier generation. She works closely with the police, in the persons of Chief Inspector Lamb (introduced in The Blind Side, 1939) and his subordinate Frank Abbott (who is on her wavelength as Lamb is not, since she was once his governess, and is even bold enough to try to pass off on her a fake Tennyson quotation). The Feminist Companion notes the ambivalent symbolism of Miss Silver's continual knitting: on the one hand this suggests motherly nurture, on the other hand the inexorable thread linking the evolution of a course of action, or the steps by which the detecting mind follows such a course. (The fact that PW set her first novel under the Terror during the French Revolution suggests that some further allusion to Madame Desfarges knitting at the guillotine would not have escaped her.)

MA was a fluent reader and writer by the time she was seven years old. She then attended various schools, except for a period of learning at home with a governess after she had been ill. She later said she was brought up on Shakespeare and Dumas .

MC was very close to her elder sister, Lucy Marguerite. The two shared a governess and shared their writing projects from seven years old. Her sister was, she said, clever, ardent, with flashes of genius, dominant in the relationship but better at launching ideas than carrying them through. Lucy Marguerite was also said to be physically fragile, and like each of her parents she suffered an accident (in her case a runaway horse) from which she never entirely recovered. She died on 12 August 1881 (according to her gravestone), while her family was living in Devon. Another sister later lived with MC in London.

SF declined an invitation to work as a governess to the young daughter of Anne Dewes (sister of Mary Delany ).

Her teachers were a Scottish nurse (a believer in witches and fairies), governesses, and a visiting teacher of art, Miss Cameron . Beatrix sketched animals constantly, both at home and at the London Zoo . Her final governess, Anne Carter (later Moore) , only a couple of years older than herself, became a lifelong friend.

Their brothers went to school, but the Rigby girls were educated by governesses, and early on by tutors (who instructed them in French, Italian, and music). ER was still very young when the employment of tutors ceased, so she may not have had this form of teaching. After the family's move to Framingham, there was only one governess in the house.

From a very early age, MMS remembered my mother teaching me to read with my brother, in a book where [there] was a picture of a white horse feeding by star-light. From the age of five to eleven she did her lessons standing, wearing for her posture an iron collar round her neck and a backboard strapped over her shoulders. Yet she was happy, and once let out would run at least half a mile through the woods. Her mother taught her Latin (learning it herself only one step ahead), and she got on faster than her brother (taught by her father). She thought it generally true that, all things being equal, girls learn more rapidly than boys during the years of childhood. When a governess wholly given up to vanity joined the family and, in 1784, her brother went to boarding school, she was very unhappy, seriously unhappy, probably for the first time of my life. She read and studied her father's Renaissance heroic romances. He took in pupils, so was well placed to supervise her learning. She later made the extraordinary claim that the first time she encountered a novel—Burney 's Cecilia, seven years after its publication—it was from a girl who had learned its five volumes by heart!

ES stayed at home, unlike her brothers who went to preparatory school and then to Eton. She learned to play the piano, play the cello, recite, develop her small talk, and to paint in watercolours (she very briefly attended a local art school). Her father also insisted that she learn gymnastics. Her first governess was Miss King-Hall.