She begins this book with a method not unlike that of Experimental Lives from Cato to George Sand. Her first chapter, Pioneers in Conversion, centres its topic on individuals, relating the sudden transformation in the life of the young William Wilberforce
, and the more gradual shift of Hannah More
from youthful dramatist and theatre-goer to moralist and philanthropist, who said she would derive more gratification from being able to lower the price of bread than from having written the Iliad.Homer
Jaeger, Muriel. Before Victoria. Chatto & Windus, 1956.
30
MJ
continues to include women writers among her examples as she moves forward. Her second chapter deals with those various groups of reformers who tackled the Evangelicization of the Church of England
. The third, A Schizoid Society, looks at the Devonshire House menage, the governessSelina Trimmer
(daughter of Sarah Trimmer
, who was mentioned in the previous chapter as an Anglican reformer), the children of various marriages and liaisons, including those of the two literary Duchesses of Devonshire, Georgiana
and Elizabeth, and including also the future Lady Caroline Lamb
. Jaeger calls Glenarvonturgid and lurid,
Jaeger, Muriel. Before Victoria. Chatto & Windus, 1956.
65
but too coherent to be the work of a lunatic.
Jaeger, Muriel. Before Victoria. Chatto & Windus, 1956.
67
She diagnoses both Byron
and Lady Caroline as split personalities with a Calvinistic perception of warring good and evil. For the new earnestness she cites Byron's wife Isabella Milbanke
, Mary Martha Sherwood
, Jane Porter
, and Hannah More
, at the time in 1817 when More looked back at her youth and wrote that now the wicked seem more wicked, and the good better than in those days.
Jaeger, Muriel. Before Victoria. Chatto & Windus, 1956.
74
She briefly considers novels produced by three successive generations of the same (matriarchal) family, Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire
's The Sylph (whose gods are good sense, discretion, modesty and rational behaviour), Lamb's Glenarvon (which shows the innocent corrupted in a fierce internal struggle),
Jaeger, Muriel. Before Victoria. Chatto & Windus, 1956.
76
and Georgiana Fullerton
's Ellen Middleton (which is glooomy, maudlin and pious). In the first and last, she writes, the triumph of goodness is too easy; only Glenarvon depicts an intense and crucial struggle.
Jaeger, Muriel. Before Victoria. Chatto & Windus, 1956.
Cattie is first met as the adopted daughter in the Scottish Sinclair family: loved by the father, the three sisters, and the governess, but resented by an uncle. Hers is a love-story but not a courtship story, since the emotional developments all occur after the wedding. Cattie loves her husband, Armand de Jençay, before they marry, but keeps her love a secret since she does not want to be chosen out of pity. Once they are married the formalities of French social life conspire with Cattie's beauty and popularity to make Armand believe not only that she does not love him but that she is unfaithful. Emotions are wound up to intense suffering on both sides, and Armand has proposed a legal separation before, with the help of a comically depicted little curé, the two are reconciled and become blissfully happy in domestic life.
PJ
was educated at home first by her mother
, who introduced her to the English Romantics. She was also taught by a governess in her early years. Chiefswood was full of books, and she read Milton
, Shakespeare
, Byron
, Tennyson
, Longfellow
, and Scott
.
Ruoff, A. LaVonne Brown. “Early Native American Women Authors: Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Sarah Winnemucca, S. Alice Callahan, E. Pauline Johnson, and Zitkala-Sa”. Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: A Critical Reader, edited by Karen L. Kilcup, Blackwell, 1998, pp. 81-111.
94
University Women’s Club of Brantford,. Significant Lives: Profiles of Brant County Women. University Women’s Club of Brantford, 1997.
43
Ritchie, Anne Thackeray. From Friend to Friend. Editor Ritchie, Emily, John Murray, 1919.
PJ
once claimed that she had read every line that Scott and Longfellow had written by the time she was twelve.
Keller, Betty. Pauline: A Biography of Pauline Johnson. Douglas and McIntyre, 1981.
This is, like Sussex Gorse, the story of a man driven by monomaniacal ambition, and like Jane Austen
's Sanditon (from which it could hardly be more different in tone) the story of a man who wishes to convert a small seaside town into a fashionable resort. Once again it is set in the nineteenth century. The young Edward Monypenny, who sits on the town council, inherits money and goes into partnership with an architect and a London businessman in a scheme to transform his environment. But his schemes, like Reuben's in Sussex Gorse, are complicated by human relationships. He has an affair with Morgan, wife of his business partner Becket (with whom he had fallen in love while she was a governess, and had not married because of the disparity of class). She is represented as an enchantress, whom her lover calls Morgan le Fay. When Morgan, distressed by the illicit nature of the relationship, kills herself, he blames her suicide on the town of Marlingate and becomes obsessed with destroying what he was formerly obsessed with building up. He marries without love, and has a son who marries Morgan's daughter. His son becomes an architect in Los Angeles, while nothing is left of Monypenny except a statue in the very inferior resort which is now Marlingate.
A governess named Annie Norman
, a person of original ideas who was prepared to abandon books and spend a whole day in talk, made a deep impression on AK
, who at this time studied botany, entomology, and other aspects of natural history.
Keary, Eliza. Memoir of Annie Keary. Macmillan, 1882.
This is a novel of two generations, each part of which seems to contain a faint foreshadowing of Charlotte Brontë
's Jane Eyre. It traces the personal and family experience of Catherine Dorrington, who is fifteen when the story opens, until she dies as an old woman, now Catherine St Aubyn, after her son, by now aged thirty-seven, has made a happy marriage. As a girl Catherine is an interesting variant of the Romantic heroine who is victimised for not conforming to social, stereotypical expectations for her class and gender. The reader first encounters her being persecuted by her aunt, Lady Vincent, for going into the shrubbery with no gloves on, and there not walking but running. Catherine's mother, a sensible woman, died at her birth. Her proud, conventional father was staggered at being left with a poor little, helpless, wailing girl to provide for instead of a son.
Kelty, Mary Ann. Trials: A Tale. Whittaker, 1824, 3 vols.
1: 9
(It clearly never occurred to him that a newborn son would have been helpless and wailing too.) In her father's estimation, then, poor Catherine had been a blank almost from the day of her birth.
Kelty, Mary Ann. Trials: A Tale. Whittaker, 1824, 3 vols.
1: 11
She grows up to be, not beautiful like a conventional heroine but extraordinary in appearance like a Romantic one, marked by a wildness and oddity of her disposition.
Kelty, Mary Ann. Trials: A Tale. Whittaker, 1824, 3 vols.
1: 11
She is, however, unlike Kelty's earlier protagonists in winning through her trials, and the next generation wins through as well. Catherine's son, Edmund St Aubyn, builds a successful career in India and marries, for love, a woman named Matilda, who has endured first an unhappy marriage and then employment as a governess before she reaches her happy ending. The novel thus combines the two most popular fictional endings: the death of the (original) heroine and the happy-ever-after marriage.
This is a novel à clef, featuring portraits of the contemporary celebrities whom AK
had known. It also draws on her lived experience to deal with the ambiguous social status of the artist
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
(the mother of the protagonist-narrator was formerly governess to her hostess), the difficulties faced by women performers in their challenge to feminine stereotypes,
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
and the mechanisms by which society punishes women who are deemed to have offended its norms. The story concerns the long engagement of the music-teacher heroine, Bessie Hope (which eventually leads to marriage). The characters, gathered on their country-house visit, are mostly denizens of the world of music. The appurtenances of social life (French furniture, French formalised hunting) are more interesting than the story, and the debates on the status of women most interesting of all.
FK
's brother-in-law Henry Kingsley
was a regular presence in life at Eversley from 1858, when he returned from Australia after a four-year failed attempt to earn his fortune in the gold fields. After this he too had a successful career as a novelist. In 1864 he married a second cousin and left Eversley. Charles Kingsley's biographer Brenda Colloms speculates that this decision probably pleased FK
, who was never friendly with Henry's wife, Sarah Maria Kingsley
, née Hazelwood or Haslewood (a former governess and her husband's second cousin), who was almost thirty years her junior.
Colloms, Brenda. Charles Kingsley: The Lion of Eversley. Constable, 1975.
281-82
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
It is unclear how MK
learned to read. She was never sent to school, nor did she have a governess or tutor. It is doubtful that she could have received much education from her parents, as her mother was generally ill and likely not very literate herself, and her father was away more often than at home. She was probably largely self-taught, and she certainly improved her knowledge through free access to her father's wide-ranging library.
Frank, Katherine. A Voyager Out: The Life of Mary Kingsley. Houghton Mifflin, 1986.
23-4
Mary and her father had a similar taste in books, both being particularly fond of travel writers and scientific texts. When Mary was in her teens she once hid Lockyer
's Solar Physics in a garden shed rather than yield it to her father, who wished to read it at the same time that she did.
qtd. in
Frank, Katherine. A Voyager Out: The Life of Mary Kingsley. Houghton Mifflin, 1986.
The first letter, the earliest piece in the volume, was said to have been written seventeen years ago at the age of seventeen: to Myra, which suggests that ML
may have been one among a coterie of writing girls. She takes her readers into her confidence in making public a letter about her business worries, her debts, and possibly by implication her hopes and fears about authorship: wishing Jupiter to rain me a Shower of Gold; sometimes madly hoping to gain a Competency; sometimes justly fearing Dungeons and Distress!
Latter, Mary. The Miscellaneous Works, in Prose and Verse. C. Pocock, 1759.
80
Many letters concern love; others return to Latter's favourite topics of wealth and status, or of their lack. The Essay makes explicit its debt to Henry Fielding
for inventing the category people of no fashion, and expresses fervent admiration for his works, Joseph Andrews in particular.
Latter, Mary. The Miscellaneous Works, in Prose and Verse. C. Pocock, 1759.
89-90
ML
has the people of Reading particularly in mind here. Among the poems, the series Soliloquies on Temporal Indigence, in blank verse, is headed with three quotations, from Shakespeare
, James Thomson
, and the book of Job, and inscribed to a female friend or patron. The whole is written in the style of Thomson
, in a series of soliloquies, some of them extremely short. It concludes with a resolution to accept the will of heaven. A Retrospective View of Indigence; or, The Danger of Spiritual Poverty is again headed with three quotations (from the Old Testament, the New Testament, and Young
's Night Thoughts. The work is dedicated to Mrs Poynz, probably the Anna Maria Poyntz
to whom Sarah Fielding
dedicated The Governess. A prose anecdote introduces the dying Melissa's reflections on death in an odd form resembling lapidary inscription or modern free verse, concluding with words from the narrator after Melissa is presumed to be dead.
Latter, Mary. The Miscellaneous Works, in Prose and Verse. C. Pocock, 1759.
The plot in some ways echoes that of Richardson
's Pamela. Cecilia Rivers, orphan daughter of a poor and saintly clergyman, comes down in the world and has to earn her living as a governess. The first volume deals with her search for a job. Her correspondent, Amelia Forrester, writes that the daughters of men in liberal professions are most exposed to become thus destitute, and that their fatal delicacy of person and manners . . . must necessarily double their sufferings.
Lee, Sophia. The Life of a Lover. G. and J. Robinson, 1804, 6 vols.
1: 5
As if remembering Mary Astell
's Serious Proposal to the Ladies, she says she would approve of convents if they did not demand total seclusion and vows of celibacy. Debate about the right clothes to wear for a job interview, in the light of the prospective employer's social rank, suggests Johnson
's Rambler no. 12.
The story opens at an art school, with male students discussing female models. Bonyng, a fair, slim youth, is, unlike the other students, embarrassed by women. Among the models one is conventionally voluptuous,
Legge, Margaret. The Price of Stephen Bonyng. Alston Rivers, 1913.
3
but it is another, Louie Hopkins, who fascinates Stephen. Louie is not beautiful, but intensely refined,
Legge, Margaret. The Price of Stephen Bonyng. Alston Rivers, 1913.
5
a clergyman's daughter who has worked as a governess, and got into modelling by sitting (for a sketch of an angel) for a friend, Janet Wren, who is studying art. Stephen (who has a downtrodden mother and a dominating, self-made father) has a difficult relationship with Louie, whom he first meets when his emotions are artificially focussed on a just-glimpsed woman whom he has taken, on the model of Dante
, as his muse or Beatrice. Louie decides to love the self-centred Stephen, devotes herself to him, rescues him from self-neglect and illness, and lives with him as his wife, but rejects his offer of marriage because she cannot respect him (much as she respects his talent). In the end it is she who succumbs to illness and dies, leaving him bereft.
The house, Merravay, is seen playing a crucial role in the lives of a series of protagonists named in the chapter titles. They include the apprentice, the witch, the matriarch, the governess, ending after the second world war with the (female) bread-winner. Most of these lives are lived in struggle. Between the chapters the narrative is carried forward in interludes. The house is finished in October 1577 for a first owner named Tom Rowhedge. Its builder has taken on the destitute orphan Jon Borage as his apprentice; he is seen by himself and others as charitable, but to Jon he is a tyrant, who mistreats his apprentice, takes the credit for Jon's brilliant design ideas, and flatly refuses to let him pursue his dream of becoming a student. When at last Jon perceives how comprehensively his hopes are to be denied, he jolts a ladder and his master falls to his death. Before fleeing the vicinity Jon is under suspicion of having committed not only murder but also the rape of Elizabeth, whom he had aspired to marry but who is now marrying a Rowhedge. He is innocent of this charge. Behind the pious ceremonies at the completion of the house, behind the inevitable visit of Queen Elizabeth
, lies the suggestion that crimes of violence could have been committed in rage and desperation by an oppressed victim, a worm who turned. In the first interlude Jon's unacknowledged son lives to become one of James I
's original baronets, to marry late in life and beget a child. Unfortunately a girl.
Lofts, Norah. Bless this House. Michael Joseph, 1954.
JL
was taught at home by a governess; she later pronounced this the safest, healthiest, the pleasantest and most effectual as well as the cheapest form of education—though she also believed that governesses needed to be better educated and better paid, and that modern education suffered from trying to pack in too much in too short a time.
qtd. in
Howe, Bea. Lady with Green Fingers. Country Life, 1961.
27
At the time she did not want to study too much: she had an awful idea of a learned lady or bluestocking, whom I always pictured as a cross old maid, who did not like little children, and who talked in a high-flown language that very few could understand.
qtd. in
Howe, Bea. Lady with Green Fingers. Country Life, 1961.
27
Her travels with her father were also undertaken with educational aims: while abroad she worked at German, French, and Italian.
Howe, Bea. Lady with Green Fingers. Country Life, 1961.
28
Back at home she felt, ironically, a positive dislike for the study of botany, but became skilled in country arts like dairying and raising poultry.
Howe, Bea. Lady with Green Fingers. Country Life, 1961.
The Anti-Suffrage Review had been launched in December 1808. CL
later wrote that at this juncture in her process of conversion to the suffrage cause, she was much concerned with the arguments of Anti-Suffragists. With more experience she realised that this was just a waste of energy.
Lytton, Constance. Prisons and Prisoners. Heinemann, 1914.
15
It appears that her aunt Theresa Earle
, though no sympathiser with her activities, lent her the money for publication. The pamphlet was, according to its publisher, still selling well by 23 April, and according to CL
's old governess it had reached Austria and made her berühmt (that is famous) there.
Lytton, Constance. Letters of Constance Lytton. Editor Balfour, Elizabeth Edith, Countess of, Heinemann, 1925.
The heroine is a woman who rashly married and is now a widow, cut off by her family, and working as a governess to support her son's military career. The book portrays the author's husband
in the physically unappetising figure of Sir Janus Allpuff and Disraeli
as Mr Jericho Jabber.
Hill, Rosemary. “Snakes and Leeches”. London Review of Books, Vol.
40
, No. 1, 4 Jan. 2018, pp. 23-5.
23-4
The narrator opens with an attack on British laws: Alas! my young lady friends, it should be at least part of your education to know that notwithstanding the much boasted British constitution, it does not contain a single law, for the protection and redress of married women.
CM
went through the typical education for a girl of her class, with an ill-qualified governess. She also read Roman history (and any history dealing with the issue of liberty) in her father's library with her brother: the age at which she took up serious study is a matter of debate. At twenty-six she was, thought Elizabeth Carter
, both extremely fashionable and astonishingly learned.
Hill, Bridget. The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian. Clarendon Press, 1992.
CM
set out with the intention of writing a biographical-historicalstudy. She made two visits to Vienna in the course of research for it. Who, she asked herself, was the little Scottish governess who . . . became case no. 3 in Freud's Five Studies in Hysteria?CM
was especially intrigued because Freud
was more secretive about this woman—whom (if Professor Freud is telling the whole truth) he had cured with ease—than about his other patients.
Mackworth, Cecily. Lucy’s Nose. Carcanet, 1992.
5
She found that all the relevant documents had been destroyed, either known to have been bombed, or even caused conveniently to disappear. She therefore admitted failure and found myself inventing (or perhaps deducing would be a better description of the process) a parallel story about Lucy,
DM
must have read widely in French fiction, which she disparaged as books of chivalry and romances.
Manley, Delarivier. “Introduction”. New Atalantis, edited by Ros Ballaster, Pickering and Chatto, 1991, p. v - xxviii.
vii
Apart from a short stay in the home of a Huguenot minister during which she perfected her French, she had her severe education from a governess. She later wished she had gone to school, but claimed her knowledge was universal. She said that but for the Revolution of 1688 she would have been a Maid of Honour (following in the footsteps of Anne Killigrew
and the future Anne Finch
).
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Manley, Delarivier. The Adventures of Rivella. Editor Zelinsky, Katherine, Broadview, 1999.
10-11, 28-9
McDowell, Paula. The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678-1730. Clarendon, 1998.
AM
was taught at home by both her mother and her father, with the help of masters for special accomplishments,
Oliphant, Margaret et al. Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign. Hurst and Blackett, 1897.
211
and for a short time by a governess. Charlotte Yonge
, who wrote of her in Women Novelists of Queen Victoria's Reign, says it was for their father that the girls practised their music, wrote their themes [essays], went out star-gazing, and studied astronomy.
Oliphant, Margaret et al. Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign. Hurst and Blackett, 1897.
211
He read Sir Walter Scott
and Shakespeare
to them aloud, and they had the absolute freedom of an extensive library.
Oliphant, Margaret et al. Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign. Hurst and Blackett, 1897.
211
Anne was no genius, but a most diligent, industrious girl.
Oliphant, Margaret et al. Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign. Hurst and Blackett, 1897.
211
From the age of fourteen, by her own decision, she read ten pages a day of real, if dry, history,
Oliphant, Margaret et al. Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign. Hurst and Blackett, 1897.
212
building the foundation for much of her later writing.
Oliphant, Margaret et al. Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign. Hurst and Blackett, 1897.
212
She also learned languages, botany, and painting. She did a copy of Murillo
's Flower Girl which won a gold medal from the Royal Academy of Arts.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder, 1908–2025, 22 vols. plus supplements.
Rose of Rubies features a young English heroine, Helen Massey, travelling to a governess job in Paris, where she solves a mystery involving murder, kidnapping, alchemy, a religious sect founded in the seventh century and still in being, and a lost precious object with magical properties: a golden rose studded with rubies, which when restored to its rightful owner is expected to initiate a utopian golden age.
Braybrooke, Neville, and Isobel English. Olivia Manning: A Life. Chatto and Windus, 2004.
34-5
Resemblances to the plot of The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
are presumed to be coincidental.
OM
, who had never visited Paris, worked out every detail from a street map.
qtd. in
Braybrooke, Neville, and Isobel English. Olivia Manning: A Life. Chatto and Windus, 2004.
17
She also studded her text with recondite allusions to works of literature and to books on alchemy, endaemonism, iconography, and gemmology.
Braybrooke, Neville, and Isobel English. Olivia Manning: A Life. Chatto and Windus, 2004.
Around the age of twelve NM
left the school and switched to taking lessons with her mother and a governess named Miss Fitch. She also took lessons in piano and painting.
Lewis, Margaret. Ngaio Marsh: A Life. Chatto & Windus, 1991.
13
Marsh, Ngaio. Black Beech and Honeydew: An Autobiography. Collins, 1981.