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.

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.

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.

Following Mrs Mulock's death, her husband abandoned his children. Rather than going out as a governess or turning to live with relatives, Dinah decided to maintain the household and provide for her brothers (although she would receive no money from her mother's trust for another two years) with earnings from her writing. They came close at times to complete destitution, but were bailed out occasionally by the trustees.

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.

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.

Several of the stories are set in Ireland. Set in England, The Governess details the search of two sisters, Mrs. Hylier and Mrs. Gresham, for a governess. As they compose an advertisement, they argue with gathered friends over the proposed wage. Mr Byfield argues in favour of an higher wage, saying: You ask for the fruits of an education that, if it be half what you demand, must have cost the governess the labour of a life, and her friends many hundred pounds. It is your duty to treat as one of your family the person who is capable of bestowing upon your children the greatest of earthly blessings; and yet you make the doing so a reason for abridging a stipend, which pays a wretched interest for time and money.

View reference

Hall, Anna Maria. Tales of Woman’s Trials. J. B. Lippincott, 1889.

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The sisters hire an orphan named Emily Dawson, who is handsome, without the consciousness of beauty—accomplished, without affectation—gentle, without being inanimate. After an illness, Emily's character comes into question when she entertains Mr Byfield's invitation to live in his house while she recovers her health.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 .

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.

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

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.

WP 's EvangelicalAnglican 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.

AB left home for a short period as a governess at Blake Hall, near Mirfield.

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.

MW 's education was neglected. At the family's highest point of prosperity her mother talked of a governess, but nothing was done till Mary went to a village school in Yorkshire (while her brother Ned attended a grammar school). She was taught little beyond reading and writing.