The protagonists' misdemeanours range from not looking before crossing the road (punished by being run over by a bus) to trying to make an unpopular governess vanish through the application of vanishing cream (punished by finding the governess is just as bad when invisible).

At the time of the 1841 census, JS was living at Maesllwch with her two younger children and two of her sisters who were still unmarried. She had six female servants and a sixteen-year-old male servant living in, while a coachman lived in the lodge with his wife and five small children. The coachman and his wife, both aged thirty-one, were the oldest members of the household. By 1851 JS had only her daughter at home: her sons were grown and gone. One of her resident sisters had married, borne four children, and died, and her husband was back with their children to live at Maesllwch as its estate agent. (Presumably he oversaw the completion of the building work there which JS's first husband had left unfinished.) There were the same number of servants as before, plus a governess, who was not listed as a servant. One of the coachman's children had died and two more had been born. By 1861 JS had remarried and left Maesllwch. The only family member in residence was her elder son, who in another decade had married, produced a son (named, of course, Walter), and more than doubled the number of servants. By 1881 he was dead, and his widow's second husband was head of the household.

HBS is remembered above all as having contributed substantially with Uncle Tom's Cabin to the build-up of anti-slavery feeling in the North before the Civil War. The sense of her influence is encapsulated in the possibly apocryphal comment which Abraham Lincoln is supposed to have made upon meeting her in 1862: So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war! Certainly the genre of anti-slavery narrative, of which she wrote the most powerful example, was hugely influential beyond the shores of her own country in proving that women's writing could legitimately address and materially affect matters of the greatest political importance. Elizabeth Barrett Browning , in a letter to Anna Jameson in 1855, argued that HBS , above all women (yes, and men of the age) has moved the world—and for good. In an earlier letter written in 1853, Barrett Browning drew an analogy, common in mid-Victorian Britain, between slavery and gender inequality: I rejoice in [her] success, both as a woman and a human being. Oh, and is it possible that you think a woman has no business with questions like the question of slavery? Then she had better use a pen no more. She had better subside into slavery and concubinage herself, I think, as in the times of old, shut herself up with the Penelopes in the women's apartment, and take no rank among thinkers and speakers.

View reference

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Editor Kenyon, Frederic G., Macmillan, 1897, 2 vols.

2: 110-11

Anna Leonowens placed Uncle Tom's Cabin at the centre of her attack on Thailand's harems and slavery system in The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870). The novel helped maintain a connection between white middle-class feminism and abolitionism that extended from the British anti-slavery campaign of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century through to the abolitionist campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts and the suffrage campaign, in which leaders such as Emmeline Pankhurst were influenced by HBS . In mid-twentieth century the US peace activist born Dorothy Rabinowitz but remembered as Dorothy Stowe (co-founder of Greenpeace ) changed her name and that of her family in honour of HBS , showing that reverence for her extended to supporters of causes not directly linked with that of slavery.

At first Gladys was taught at home by governesses: the stout, comical angel Fräulein Sanders, followed by several lunatics, one elderly nymphomaniac (unsuccessful) and a prostitute (that is, a governess who was dismissed when a man was found in her bedroom). One of them killed herself two days after leaving the Stern household. Gladys was taught the piano, but not very successfully. One of the first storybooks she remembered was Mrs Molesworth 's "Carrots": Just a Little Boy. Other books of her childhood included two by Grace Aguilar (Home Influence and The Mother's Recompense), Charlotte Yonge 's The Daisy Chain, and Martha Finley 's Elsie Dinsmore books. Later she said she read and studied purely for pleasure—Literature. especially English Literature, History, Modern Languages—and later regretted never having been trained or compelled to read anything difficult.

FAS was apparently educated by governesses until her elder sister's education was complete. With the boys away at boarding-school, however, her mother dispensed with the governess when Flora would have been the only pupil, to save money. Afterwards, her mother, who had taught her to read, also taught her to teach herself and did not censor the books available to her. (Her father did not concern himself with his children's education.)

Though nothing specific is known of MS 's education, she became an accomplished linguist. She was probably taught at home, either by her mother or a governess; later she and her little sister had a visiting music master. At about nineteen she was rapturously fond of antiquity, particularly the gothic.

As an adult GS keenly regretted the inadequacy of her education. She shared a governess with her sisters, while her sporty, unbookish brother was sent to Winchester , a highly academic public school. She read widely, but from at least the age of six she had a reputation with her mother and her nurse as the naughty one of the family.

Two children, now grown up, reminisce about their plan (never carried through) for disposing of their governess (whose nickname is short for Sadist) by tying her wrists, getting her trapped by the incoming tide, and demanding money with menaces.

It is a powerful tale of greed and deception in which a man seeks to defraud his stepdaughter Lucia by concealing her true identity. One of its characters is a woman of almost forty years of age who goes into service as a governess or lady's companion and who experiences conflicting loyalties in becoming the friend and confidante of her charge.

FS was educated as a young girl in Paris by a governess and at a day school. While there she took piano lessons from Franz Liszt .

MS seems to waver about how to conclude her story. Statira's disgrace is salved when the count's sister (a nun) tells him the story of a woman, Idela de Toggenburg, who had the fortitude to leave her unworthy husband and enter a convent, although she loved him. This tale causes Harton to entertain, for the first time, the possibility of his wife's innocence. But Showes chooses after all not to give the novel a happy ending on Statira's vindication. Instead Statira, still not received by her husband, re-appears in the story incognita, in the person of Madame Laborde, a perfect governess for her own children. When the children fall ill with smallpox she nurses them safely through it—only to die of the dread disease herself, leaving her husband to the poignancy of his regrets, for the loss of her, whose worth he did not know how to estimate when living.

FS was educated at home by a governess named Miss May , who taught such things as were in those days considered suitable for little girls, and learned French from her mother.

DLS was educated at home by a governess. When she was six her father began to teach her Latin.

At thirteen VSW began attending a small day school run by Helen Wolff (whose name is variously spelled in various sources) in South Audley Street, off Park Lane. The staff were mostly male. Vita attended this school with Violet Keppel (later Trefusis) and Rosamund Grosvenor (later Lynch). Vita and Violet had private Italian lessons together also.

No information is known about LMS 's schooling. It is likely that as a member of an aristocratic family she did not attend school, but was taught at home by a governess. Her poems, however, indicate early and precocious literary knowledge, and a child who dictates a verse drama at the age of six is evidently schooled. Interestingly, she dedicates her Collected Poems, 1939, To you who taught me what no book can teach, though she does not specify who she means. In her introductions both to her selections from Jane Austen and to her anthology of poetry by living women, she writes about the importance of influences—that is, of learning from other writers.

JMR married his second wife, Sarah Rebecca (1824-1909). She was a former governess and the daughter of well-known Chartist and journalist William Carpenter .

Act one opens with Kitty, an emotional girl of twenty-two, helping the two younger Jevons children with their studies. Kitty is a relative of and governess for the Jevonses. It quickly becomes clear that Mr and Mrs Jevons do not think highly of her. Will, a neighbour from a respectable family, and Kitty are in love, despite the fact that Will has an understanding with the eldest Jevons daughter, Amelia. Edward Sotheby rents a cottage from Mrs Patullo, a pretty, vivacious woman of about twenty-eight. Kitty and Will run off together by train to Edinburgh, but Kitty changes her mind and returns. This escapade brings her condemnation from the Jevonses and others in the town. She leaves the Jevons family and Sotheby takes her in. This produces small-town gossip, and Sotheby tries to make things right by proposing to Kitty despite the fact that he is in love with Mrs Patullo, who reciprocates his feelings. Mrs Patullo then reveals that she is posing as a grass widow (a woman, that is, with an absent husband) in order to protect her wealth. In fact, she is not married. Kitty learns of the pair's feelings and leaves town in order to free Sotheby from any obligation to her.

In an Author's NoteNRS tenders her thanks to the shades of Miss Austen, Miss Burney , Miss Edgeworth , Mrs Sherwood and Mr. W. M. Thackeray for the life-long pleasure they have given her (and Rose Macaulay for contributing a risqué ballad). The name of Sherwood is there because, having read her posthumous novel Caroline Mordaunt; or, The Governess as a child, NRS went back to it for writing her Fairfax book. The novel was reprinted two months after publication.

On leaving the St Quintins' school FAR became a governess. Her employers included, for several years, Lord Bessborough (one of whose children was the future Lady Caroline Lamb ).

Nothing is known of her except that she had a daughter, who published an anonymous, didactic, Christian novel entitled The Governess; or, Politics in Private Life, 1836.

RMR dedicated this work to Major-General Sir Adam Williamson , a career soldier who had very recently returned to England after a spell as governor-general of Jamaica. Writing it just after her father's death, she felt she lacked the confidence which his judgement would have given her. In any case, it was her best-seller. A second edition (and a French translation) followed in 1797, and by 1825 eight more editions (including ones at Philadelphia and Cork) and a German translation appeared. It was continuously in print until 1882. An edition in English was issued at Paris in 1807, and it was one of the earliest titles included in a series called Collection des Meilleurs Romans Anglais. At her first meeting with the sixteen-month-old Princess Charlotte 's probationary sub-governess, Anne Haydon, Princess Caroline not only recommended the book but lent her employee her copy.

In the same year, 1803, she was suggested by Thomas Erskine as a suitable person to become governess to the seven-year-old Princess Charlotte , who stood second in line for the British throne. She wrote in courtierly terms of her willingness to take up the honour of educating the princess, but she was not in the end appointed.

Taught by governesses until she was thirteen, Margaret Haig Thomas learned to read at about five. She was taught German and French, and she also learned Welsh as a child but did not retain it in adulthood. She wrote that she learnt what trifles I did from governesses.Margaret's aunt Charlotte Haig , who had wanted to be a doctor and who, in the absence of formal education, made do by reading science books, drew her niece's attention to Arnold 's poetry and Gibbon 's history. Margaret also enjoyed Kipling 's The Jungle Book and Stevenson 's Ballads. She read, with the digestion of a shark,Charles Kingsley , Sir Walter Scott , Byron , Browning , Tennyson , Anthony Hope , and John Stuart Mill . She thought compulsory reading of Shakespeare and the Bible unreasonable.

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