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 Rachel Field (her great-niece) in a novel entitled All This, and Heaven Too.

Her comments on the family governesses reflect her early awareness of her class status. Her paternal grandfather, William Cambridge , was a well-respected farmer and agriculturist, but his son Henry, AC 's father, did not seem to be able to handle money. Although the Cambridge family certainly lived comfortably, employing servants, labourers, and governesses, critics Margaret Bradstock and Louise Wakeling note that Henry Cambridge's lack of business acumen seems to have led to fairly frequent moves in the first two decades of Ada's life.

After this school closed because of her ill health and her mother's opium problem, she worked for nearly thirty years more as schoolteacher and as governess.

SG 's parents had a troubled marriage. Her father's depression, alcoholism, and his affairs with a succession of governesses and maids made for a difficult home life. He was controlling and sometimes violent; at one point he even threw a knife at his wife.SG bore witness to several such unpleasant scenes in her childhood, as well as to her father's threats of suicide.

CG 's relation by marriage the Countess of Arran had been governess to Princess Charlotte and was described as a leader of fashion.

Her marriage to a London lawyer should have set EJ securely in the professional class, but her husband's failings forced her into the ungenteel position of earning her own living, and scholar James Paterson 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'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 Selina Trimmer , 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.

After two years in ManchesterML took a job as a milliner with Briggs and Co. 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. William Walton Herringham . 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. Robert Miles , rector of Bingham near Hawksworth, but mentions as her first governess job her post with another clergyman, named Hope, at Derby. Here ML 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.

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.

View reference

Martineau, Harriet, and Gaby Weiner. Deerbrook. Virago.

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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 Kay Mussel observes that as Victoria Holt, JPis particularly adept at creating terror in a confined space and in imagining interesting motives for her villains.

ATR and her sister were educated by a series of governesses in London. It was not until the arrival of Miss Truelock 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 Amy Crowe (who later married Edward Thackeray ) 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 Gaskell 's Cranford (which she had introduced), or the poems of Mary Elizabeth Coleridge , which she sent to Swinburne .

They taught all subjects except French and German. They later employed additional masters and a governess, and ES enlarged her house to accommodate their students.

NS 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 E. Nesbit , whom NS later admired, was not known to her as a child). The children were used to performing in parish plays and concerts.

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.

MA , whose work spans the Romantic and Victorian periods, was a poet who wrote wittily on religious and secular topics, and was an early champion of the governess. With Felicia Hemans , she was the one of the two most prolific British contributors to annuals in the USA.

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.

Like most girls of her class, though her brothers were sent away to school, Cynthia Charteris (later LCA ) was educated at home by governesses. For a time she had an unusually serious education in the Stanway classroom, and she also travelled with her mother. When her family was in London for the season, Cynthia was taught subjects which were outside the scope of a country schoolroom.

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 Byron , Burns , Shelley , Wordsworth , Moore , Shakspeare [sic] , Scott , Milton , and Tennyson . 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 Saladin (the Saracen or Islamic opponent of Richard Coeur-de-Lion 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.

DDM was almost exclusively educated at home by governesses. She developed an important relationship with one governess, Miss Maud Waddell , whom the du Maurier family nicknamed Tod. Later, Tod was governess to DDM 's own children.