Amelia B. Edwards , cousin of MBE , became known as a novelist, travel-writer, and Egyptologist. Matilda got to know her well while serving as a governess-pupil at Mimosa House in Peckham. Amelia was several years older, her superior in knowledge of the world and in intellectual attainments generally, but became a boon companion, more like a sister than a cousin.MBE later wrote of herself and her cousin as two Dromios (alluding to Shakespeare 's The Comedy of Errors) or Siamese twins; many people confused them, and others thought them one person. The two had a close friendship of thirty years, but never discussed their respective writing projects.

AB published seven novels at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century. A former governess left a widow with a son to support, she depended on her writing for an income. The play occasionally attributed to her is not hers.

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.

In an effort to improve her daughter's health, Georgiana's mother took her with her everywhere, mostly to country houses, and mostly without her governess. Consequently, Georgiana's early education came from hearing people (many of them very remarkable characters) talk, and listening to their conversation with an attention undisturbed by any other children. Among those she heard conversing about the topics of the day was Hannah More .

LC began her education at home under a governess.

The title-page quotes Byron on the power of Fate. The heroine is not always pretty, nor is she always Miss Neville. The book opens in the voice of eleven-year-old Nora O'Neill, known as Miggs, generally accepted as the ugly one of a juvenile Irish trio (two girls and a boy) who are holy terrors. They are burying a bottle which they mean to come back for in ten years. They habitually race each other in donkey-carts or play practical jokes: eggs in a pocket, a holly branch in an apple-pie bed. They are subjects of a remote ruler, Nora's grandfather (proprietor of the decaying feudal estate of Gallow in Ireland) and enemies of the gardener and the governess. Their acmé of physical and intellectual enjoyment is an afternoon in the aged Patsey's cabin, gathered round his turf fire, roasting potatoes in the ashes, and listening to his thrilling recollections of the Rebellion of 1798. The children acquire another enemy in the shape of the visiting, English heir to Gallow, the studious seventeen-year-old Maurice Beresford. Maurice thinks Patsey a bloodthirsty old rebel, who deserved to have his neck stretched. He also thinks Nora (the daughter of Mr Beresford's daughter) has a better claim to inherit the estate, from familiarity and need, than himself (the son of Mr Beresford's son). (The old man was enraged when both his children married spouses who were not Anglo-Irish aristocracy.)

ME had more lasting influence than her predecessors on the development of the girls'-school-story tradition in English, though Sarah Fielding 's The Governess stands at the head of the genre.

In this story Margaret Ansted arrives at the sleepy town of Islesworth to become a maid at the Walcombe estate following the death of her father. This action is described as a transformation into the angel of the house (an allusion to the fairly recent poem of that name by Coventry Patmore ): she had taken to herself wings, and was gaining for her loved ones at home the wherewithal to eat, and drink, and to be clothed. Margaret quickly becomes the governess of the youngest child, Eve, and gains the respect of the whole household, since she is as good as she is beautiful. Predictably, Harrington, the eldest son, falls madly in love with Margaret. She rejects his request to keep a photograph that a family friend had insisted she pose for, but this is not enough to dissuade him. When he writes the governess a letter trying to persuade her of the sincerity of his passion, she feels forced to resign and leave Walcombe as soon as possible. They go on to lead their separate lives, marrying spouses appropriate to their respective social positions, but Margaret names her favourite child after Harrington.

At some point EJW worked as a teacher or governess. Considering how well-known her books became, it is remarkable how little information is available about her life.

The novel's protagonist, Lady Isabel Vane, is left destitute on her father's death and marries the steadfast but dull lawyer Archibald Carlyle without truly loving him. With a home life made miserable by her prim sister-in-law, and believing that her husband loves another woman, Isabel leaves her marriage and small children for an aristocratic lover, Francis Levison, with whom she has an illegitimate child. Abandoned by her lover and having lost her child in a train accident in France which she herself barely survived, the remorseful and disfigured Isabel returns to her former home as Madame Vine, governess to her own children. (Carlyle has divorced her in the meantime—a then-topical reference to the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act—and remarried.) Socially dead from her elopement, very nearly killed in the accident, she resembles a living corpse, or her own ghost. (Andrew Mangham has argued that Wood taps the atmosphere of the gothic or ghost story without resort to the supernatural.) Isabel nurses her children devotedly, without revealing her identity even when one of them dies. Her own demise follows soon afterwards, in a deathbed scene in which Carlyle forgives and blesses her.

In 1873 however, when Edith was nearly twelve, her parents hired a very different kind of governess. Anna Bahlmann was the daughter of immigrants, orphaned at twelve years old, a survivor of tough times, and still continuing her own self-education in her twenties. The two of them read poetry together in many languages and corresponded until Bahlmann's death in 1916. Wharton was her executor.

During the time she spent at her great-aunt's house in Croydon, LV 's novel suggests she was taught at home by a family governess, a close friend of her mother, identified there as Miss De Lisle. She early discovered a love of literature, and recounts reading her first play, Monk Lewis 's Castle Spectre (an extremely popular gothic melodrama, in which the heroine's mother has been murdered and walks as a bloodstained ghost, and her father lives secretly imprisoned in a dungeon under her feet). Her great-aunt was reluctant to let her read at all: When I Was a Child depicts her great-aunt burning the play in front of the protagonist, exclaiming that she would see that she read none. After a sustained quarrel over these restrictions, eventually this prohibition is lifted and the child is granted access to her great-aunt's bookcase, containing works such as Jonathan SwiftGulliver's Travels and Miguel de CervantesDon Quixote. The novel suggests that Linda's great-aunt died in the late 1840s, forcing her to move to her Uncle Josh's home in Clapham in South London while her parents remained in China.

While her career ambitions centred on becoming a writer, she also at her mother's urging found work as governess to a brilliant pupil, Oliver Knox, seven-year-old son of Dillwyn Knox —and nephew, therefore, of the writer Winifred Peck (though it is not clear that ET was aware of this relationship). Then she was asked to teach other children, and ran an impromptu kindergarten at her parents' home. Later came a job in the Boots circulating library at High Wycombe. She enjoyed this job, but left it when she got married. More important to her was her involvement in amateur theatricals. She was active on stage with High Wycombe Theatre Club in 1932-4, often playing leading ladies. She returned to acting only a week after her wedding, playing opposite her husband.

Of HS 's four novels this year, The Daily Governess; or, Self-Dependence and Alone in the World were in volume form, while Our Mary; or, Murder Will Out and The Girl We Leave Behind Us were London Journal serials.

At three years old ES loved books and at four she could read extremely well. The move to Suffolk brought the Smiths a governess who was only sixteen but whose abilities exceeded her years, and who returned to the family later. At twelve Elizabeth was already skilled in music, dancing, drawing and the study of perspective, French, Italian, geometry and other branches of mathematics. Her greatest enjoyment was in reading and in writing poetry. She also played the harp and the pianoforte. When Henrietta Maria Bowdler had the family to stay after the bank crash, she instructed Elizabeth in a course of ancient and modern history, English literature, religious studies, and astronomy, while Mary Hunt helped her with German, Spanish (which she had begun on already), and botany. She began on her own account to study Arabic and Persian, and then Latin and Greek with John Claxton and Hebrew (from the New Testament) for herself. Her inspiration for Greek and Hebrew was the story of Mrs Bowdler 's having mastered them to forward her study of the Bible. Erse (Gaelic or Celtic) was another of Elizabeth's accomplishments, inspired by Ossian (the favourite poetry of her childhood, to which she remained loyal even after acquaintance with the classics slightly lowered her opinion of it). Later still in her list of studies came algebra.

CS persevered with writing plays, and began studying drama and theatre history. One of her early plays, also performed at the Birmingham School of Art , starred her sister . Another centred on an actress unjustly seen as scandalous, who works incognita as a governess. Another, the one-act Mrs Jordan, was given a skilled amateur production in Birmingham. The great eighteenth-century actress Dorothy Jordan was a heroine to CS , because of her breeches roles and her bold and skilful navigation of scandal over her royal lover. Later Smedley sent Mrs Jordan to Mrs Patrick Campbell , who put it on at the Royalty Theatre (where it ran for six months as a curtain-raiser to Hermann Sudermann 's Magda). Mrs Campbell played the starring role, after trouble with the censor over its allusions to a member of the royal family behaving badly. Another play by CS , Kitty, had a provincial tour and was later invited to tour South Africa, but by that time the manuscript had been lost. In her early twenties CS was furiously writing plays for such prominent performers as Mrs Patrick Campbell and Violet Vanbrugh , but was still young enough to take it hard when the perpetual change of plans left my plays, so enthusiastically accepted, unproduced.

Her education began with her mother and a governess. At six she began attending a class run by the sister of another Rugby master. Later came visits to a piano teacher, and at home a Belgian governess, then another, longer-term governess, much loved. This was Miss Ohlson, or Moly, who although not an intellectual communicated simple arithmetic, spelling, and finding your way among the contents of the prayer book: all this with other girls who came to the Bradby household for lessons, and acted in scenes from Shakespeare produced by Mrs Bradby.AR later remembered marking with a tear the cover of a book called Reading without Tears; or, A Pleasant Mode of Learning to Read, by Favell Lee Bevan, later Mrs Mortimer , which dated from 1857. A Frenchwoman who came to give lessons in French was disliked as boring. Anne became a great reader, whose favourite authors included a long list of boys' adventure writers, plus Mary Louisa Molesworth (especially The Cuckoo Clock), Juliana Horatia Ewing , Charlotte Yonge , Frances Hodgson Burnett , Louisa May Alcott , E. Nesbit (whose The Magic City was a seminal book for her), and her own mother (among whose books one of her favourites was The Happy Families, based on the famous card-game characters), as well as Catherine Sinclair 's Holiday House.

Gilbert Fleming, a greedy, unscrupulous man, kidnaps the daughter of Lady Rosamond Carleton so that his own daughter, Maud, can inherit her property. When Maud dies unexpectedly Gilbert decides to raise Rosamond's daughter as his own. Years later, a young man named Francis Godfrey discovers that the new Maud is not Gilbert's real daughter and informs her that she is illegitimate. Distraught, Maud fakes suicide and runs away. She adopts the name Miss Travers and is hired as a governess by Mrs Arbuthnot, a close friend of her biological mother, Rosamond, whom she now meets for the first time that she can remember. She returns to her father after learning that he is about to be arrested for a robbery that was committed by Francis. Her sincere love for him causes Gilbert to have a change of heart. He tries to repair the damage he has done, only to die soon afterwards. But with his confession of the truth of Maud's identity, she takes her position as a wealthy heiress and is free to marry her true love, Phillip Ormond.

The title-page quotes Mark Akenside . This time the husband dies of consumption, leaving his widow, Maria Gardiner, with five surviving children and a sixth on the way. Although all six end the story well established in marriage or a career or both, this novel concentrates more on the career choices of the elder girls than the boys. The studious eldest of the family, recognising that she has not the education to become a teacher (though plenty to be a governess) dutifully becomes a milliner. The impractical Sarah finds a patron who pays for the development of her talent as an artist, and marries a fellow-artist whose character seems to be based on that of BH 's second husband.

Thomas Holcroft held progressive ideas about women and their education, as he showed in 1794 in a brief review of Miss or Mrs. C. Short 's Dramas for the Use of Young Ladies (to which Anna Seward had contributed a prologue and epilogue). Here he wrote that one cannot expect to find the courageous spirit of inquiry, which should lead the mind from truth to truth, without any dread of parting with prejudices, in a book for young ladies. Unfortunately for them, the maxims of education at present will not admit them to overstep the precise and chilling confines of the governess's decorum. Shoulder-straps, back-boards, and neck-setting, with an impertinent, because superficial knowlege of French, music, and drawing, added to a waste of ingenuity in absurd needle-works, and as large a dose of maukish sentiment as the tutoress knows how to administer, form women who are destined to a life either of inanity or dissipation.

View reference

qtd. in

Forster, Antonia. Emails to Isobel Grundy about Thomas Holcroft. 18 July 2010.

In the last year of the life of her mother, Margaret Hunt , VH completed Margaret's novel The Governess, and published it with a preface by Ford Madox Ford .

The stories included The Cumberers, The Stolen Treasure, and Emily's Ambition. They all contain a lesson or a moral of some kind. My Great Aunt's Picture warns of the dangers of envy, while Dr Deane's Governess illustrates that there is a time and a place for female independence. At the end of the narrative, Fanny, a young governess, suggests that she would like to work forever by stating that having once tasted the pleasure of independence, I shall never like to be dependent again. Her uncle informs her, however, that she may yet, like the majority of your sex . . . promise, on due persuasion, that you will honour and obey. Fanny therefore agrees to leave her independence behind for Dr Deane's next governess.

Her friends or perhaps patrons included General Henry Seymour Conway (father of the writer-sculptor Anne Damer ) and his whole family.Matthew Lewis (though given his general view of fiction by women he may have been less pleased with IK 's writings than he implied) was moved by her financial distress to introduce her to his publisher, and to attempt (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) to extract her father's arrears of half-pay from the War Office . After this failure he turned instead to financing the education of one her son William Martin Kelly , which he did for three years from August 1802, and after that procure him a job. In late 1803 he scaled down his assistance on account of speculations that he and IK were collaborating on their writing, but he continued to help indirectly, and left William an annuity (safer for a spendthrift than a straightforward legacy) in his will. Another good friend was Henrietta Fordyce (whose biography IK later wrote), who before her marriage had been governess in the family of the future Lady Anne Lindsay (later Barnard) , balladist and diarist.