Wilson, Barbara Ker. Noel Streatfeild. Bodley Head, 1961.
16, 19
462 results for governess
Patricia Wentworth
Though the Feminist Companion says that Miss Silver is a character [i]n the mould of
'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
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
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
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.)
Noel Streatfeild
and her sisters had a governess at home, although they also attended day-schools. (The eldest, Ruth, was away for long periods staying with the grandparents because of her delicate health.) Their mother taught them botany and flower painting and read to them (though
, whom
later admired, was not known to her as a child). The children were used to performing in parish plays and concerts.
Mary Martha Sherwood
From a very early age,
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—
's Cecilia, seven years after its publication—it was from a girl who had learned its five volumes by heart!
Beatrix Potter
Her teachers were a Scottish nurse (a believer in witches and fairies), governesses, and a visiting teacher of art,
. Beatrix sketched animals constantly, both at home and at the
. Her final governess,
, only a couple of years older than herself, became a lifelong friend.
Jean Plaidy
Unlike Jean Plaidy novels, Victoria Holt novels centre around entirely fictional characters. These novels tend to follow one of three available plot lines. There is the conspiring husband plot, whose heroine suspects her husband of seeking to murder her; the governess gothic, whose heroine comes to board and work in a mansion haunted by terror and danger; and the adventuress plot, whose female protagonist uses disguise and fraud to achieve her ends.Victoria Holt sets most of her gothic novels in the nineteenth century, and she often uses foreign settings, such as Australia, the Mediterranean, or the Pacific Islands, as backdrops, to vary the traditional English mansion-and-estate setting. Her villains (of both sexes), who tend to belong to the family which owns the estate, are often to some degree insane; others are depicted as acting wickedly from misguided kindness. For example, the protagonist of The Legend of the Seventh Virgin (1965) keeps assuring myself that to sin for the sake of one you love is not the same as sinning for yourself. These villains use the ancient milieu as a weapon against innocent characters. Often, the heroine has to figure out some key to the past which will solve the mystery of the villain and the estate. Critic
observes that as Victoria Holt, is particularly adept at creating terror in a confined space and in imagining interesting motives for her villains.
Catherine Gore
's relation by marriage the
had been governess to
and was described as a leader of fashion.
Elizabeth Justice
Her marriage to a London lawyer should have set
securely in the professional class, but her husband's failings forced her into the ungenteel position of earning her own living, and scholar
detects a below-stairs tone in her account of her time in Russia as a governess (that is a servant) and places her at the desperate end of the gentry spectrum.
Lady Caroline Lamb
Lady Caroline's upbringing was—by the standards of her class—advanced, eccentric or bohemian, though she must have exaggerated when she told Sydney Morgan that she was so neglected in her education, she could not write at ten years old. She was apparently a ringleader among the Devonshire House children which included her first cousins and other children of scandalous parentage. A second, tougher governess was hired to supplement the attentions of
, and laudanum (that is, opium) drops were often used to quiet Caroline when she was obstreperous (asking unsuitable questions about religion, for instance). Her insubordination included irreverent rhymes about Selina: The cowslip & the lemon pale / with Selly's cheeks might vie. Much later Caroline remembered how she had hated company and fine clothes, and preferred washing a dog, or polishing a piece of Derbyshire spar, or breaking in a horse, to any accomplishment in the world.
Mary Linskill
After two years in Manchester
took a job as a milliner with
at Newcastle in Staffordshire. She stayed there, living in lodgings, for three years, till she was twenty-three. She then moved from Newcastle to Hawksworth in Nottinghamshire, where she worked as a schoolteacher at the National School run by the local clergyman, the Rev.
. The only other teacher covered French and music; Mary undertook everything else, and particularly enjoyed teaching drawing. She lost the job, however, when an epidemic of scarlet fever sent most of the boys home and Mr Herringham could no longer afford her wages. Her most recent biographer, Cordelia Stamp, does not support the story that she was a governess in the family of the Rev.
, rector of Bingham near Hawksworth, but mentions as her first governess job her post with another clergyman, named Hope, at Derby. Here
virtually filled the position of mother to six children whose actual mother was an invalid (or, according to Stamp, a hypochondriac). She stayed there till early 1869. This position gave her the opportunity of playing the organ at church on Sundays, and developing her aptitude for flower-painting, in both oil and watercolours. Cordelia Stamp reproduces an oil portrait by her.
Elizabeth, Margravine of Anspach
As she tells the story, he had pursued her persistently, arousing her anger by asking her mother for her hand before he had even met her. His family's financial affairs were complicated, but he offered an undertaking to marry her which he would sign in his blood. She says she felt gratitude, and no dislike to him, and therefore accepted, though she had wanted to postpone marrying until she was twenty. All her family except her mother wept at her wedding, and her governess shut herself up in her room.Lady Craven bore her husband four daughters (the first two within the first two years of marriage) and three sons. William Craven was at first a doting husband and she was overjoyed when he invited her beloved governess to live with them; but neither was a faithful spouse.
Marjorie Bowen
The Praslin case of 1847 (thought to have been a factor in precipitating popular revolution in France in the following year) is the foundation for the novel. The duchesse de Praslin was brutally murdered by her husband, who clumsily attempted to conceal his guilt, then poisoned himself and died. The police questioned a young governess whom they suspected of being his accomplice and mistress, but then let her go. She made a new life in the United States, married to a minister, and was sympathetically portrayed by the novelist
(her great-niece) in a novel entitled All This, and Heaven Too.
Fredrika Bremer
Governess
Sarah Harriet Burney
A Governess
Mary Cowden Clarke
Governess
Florence Dixie
Lady Florence was at first educated at home in Scotland. After a first, unsuccessful attempt to place her in a convent she had, in France, an Irish Catholic governess whom she calls Miss O'Leary. This governess burned a number of books given her by her dead brother, Lord Francis, as being subversive of morality and quite unfit for the perusal of a young lady, especially a Catholic one. The books (which perished before she could read them) were by
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
, and
. Florence defied Miss O'Leary by various rebellious acts. When her clothes were taken away to prevent her from climbing out of her bedroom window down a rope, she went dressed in her brother's clothes, which was regarded as a serious crime. Miss O'Leary taught her languages in particular, and attempted to teach her the religious instruction which she refused to accept. A male tutor taught her mathematics. Her final showdown with the governess occurred over a dictation on the topic of
(the Saracen or Islamic opponent of
in the Third Crusade), whom Florence persisted in regarding as a hero, resisting the idea that he must have been a wicked man because he was an infidel. Her mother intended travelling to be educational for her children, teaching them to know the world as well as subjects like dancing, for which she could engage masters to teach them.
Daphne Du Maurier
was almost exclusively educated at home by governesses. She developed an important relationship with one governess, Miss
, whom the du Maurier family nicknamed . Later, Tod was governess to
's own children.
Helena Wells
gives a hair-raising account of her first interview for a school-teaching job (which she turned down). At past thirty she started a school with her sister in London. By 1798 she had given it up and was seeking a job as a family governess. She was indignant that a governess should be expected to eat at the steward's table, and noted that a male tutor would be treated with more respect. A decade later she did some research in Yorkshire for a suitable building in which to start a Protestant nunnery.
Dorothy Wellesley
was educated at home.
thought this unfortunate, as she could have benefited from the discipline of school and the intellectual stimulus of a university. Dorothy, however, later recalled how her Luxembourgeois governess had protected her by reducing the hours of schoolwork demanded by her mother, and how even the reduced load was enough to cause night sweating and shaking, and sleepwalking into the schoolroom to repeat her lessons. An impressionable child, she was terrorised with ghost stories both by her brother and by an old housekeeper. This governess taught her French. Later she was introduced to ancient Greek history by a Fräulein Reuss, who was described as a finishing governess. She learned the skills of riding, rowing, and fly-fishing. She was, she said later, brought up in a Philistine environment. Artists were unknown, poetry merely funny.
Ellen Weeton: Biography
Governess
Anne Thackeray Ritchie
and her sister were educated by a series of governesses in London. It was not until the arrival of
in 1850 that their father was finally satisfied with a governess's ability to stimulate and challenge his daughters. When Thackeray's parents visited London for a year in 1848-1849, they supervised the lessons, and visiting teachers tutored the girls in music and drawing. Thackeray invited
(who later married
) to act as governess and companion to the girls between 1854 and 1862. Anne Thackeray noted in 1856 that she was spending all the money she could get on novels. Her letters are full of talk about books, plays, and concerts, and in later life she sent copies of favourite books to others, such as
's Cranford (which she had introduced), or the poems of
, which she sent to
.
Dorothy Richardson
When the family moved to Worthing in 1881, Dorothy attended the local school, which she disliked. In London she and her younger sister Jessie had a governess, but they did not appreciate the female education she offered, and were very unco-operative. The governess only lasted a year.
Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis
Stéphanie-Félicité was seven when her governess, who was only sixteen, joined the family. In later years she regularly stressed the inadequacy of the way French girls of her class were taught, arguing in Discours sur la suppression des couvens des religieuses, 1790, that governesses ought to enjoy the same family status as tutors, instead of being ranked with the servants. Literature that she read with her governess included novels by
and plays by
. She took the role of Love (Amour) in a pastoral comic opera written by her mother, and later learned to play the harp.
Amy Levy
was an upper-middle-class Jew from a family which had been English for over a century, though they travelled the world for career purposes more freely than most English people. They thought of themselves as wholly assimilated, and seem to have practised the Jewish religion only sketchily. They occasionally attended the Reform synagogue in Upper Berkeley Street; the children visited
churches with their governess.
Many reference books still repeat the mistaken story, which originated in an essay published in 1912 by
, that she came from a poverty-stricken background, had very little schooling, and later worked in a factory and lived in a garret.
Harriet Martineau
The careful delineation of the contrasted sisters is one of the book's strengths, as is the portrait of Maria Young, a disabled single governess. A major theme of the text is education and character-formation. As a contribution to urgent ongoing debate, it acknowledges the evils of the position of a governess—between the family and the servants, but presents this as a secondary issue compared with a governess's ineffectual teaching, which can never countervail the education of circumstances, that is of negative home influences. Maria's painful situation gives her the privileged perspective of a detached observer of life, and this aligns her with the author: these great affairs of life lie distinctly under the eye of such as are themselves cut off from them. . . . I am quite alone; and why should I not watch for others? Every situation has its privileges and its obligations. . . . Women who have what I am not to have, a home, an intimate, a perpetual call out of themselves, may go on more safely, perhaps, without any thought for themselves, than I with all my best consideration: but I, with the blessing of a peremptory vocation, which is to stand me instead of sympathy, ties and spontaneous action,—I may find out that it is my proper business to keep an intent eye upon the possible events of other people's lives, that I may use slight occasions of action which might otherwise pass me by.
Grace Aguilar
The plot is highly wrought and melodramatic, in many respects anticipating the sensation novel by decades. A secret about Florence is intimated early on. Then, with unspecified disaster looming over her and when her family is ruined by a fruitless attempt to claim an estate, she dedicates herself to the service of her ailing parents, her romantic poet brother, and her beautiful sister, by going out as a governess—she rebuts an acquaintance's characterisation of her as a heroine by noting that she is unwillingly independent. She unexpectedly becomes an heiress herself, but is thrown into crisis by the revelation that she is not her parents' child and is perhaps illegitimate. She selflessly rejects a proposal from the man she loves (providentially avoiding incest with one who turns out to be her natural half-brother) and makes her fortune over to her adoptive sister so that he may marry her instead. She is eventually proved to be both legitimate and the rightful heir to his estate.