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 Madeleine de Scudéry and plays by Marie-Anne Barbier . She took the role of Love (Amour) in a pastoral comic opera written by her mother, and later learned to play the harp.

As young children, VH and her sisters were educated by a series of German, then French and Italian governesses. Violet read broadly from her mother 's library, and was encouraged to write and sketch.

AL 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 Christian churches with their governess.

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.

DW was educated at home. Vita Sackville-West 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.

HW 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.

She was educated by governesses, who were mostly more interested in accomplishments than in serious study. New fiction was expressly forbidden. Edith felt intellectually isolated, though she devoured the classics for herself and had fevers of story-telling.

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.

Encouraged to read widely, MA was educated at home by governesses. Years later she said that having no playmates as a child, she steeped herself in books, mostly poetry. This was the best education I had; for fifty years ago young ladies' studies were curious examples of how not to do it. In a relationship that resembled that of the young Elizabeth Barrett with Hugh Stuart Boyd , she frequently visited a blind Scotsman in her area and spent hours reading aloud to him, while he instructed her on the meanings and interpretations of the texts. She also became knowledgeable in politics by reading the newspaper to him.

Lady Anne's father, James Lindsay , was the fifth Earl of Balcarres, an army officer, and a Jacobite. He married Anne Dalrymple when he was sixty. He is described as deaf, with a gouty foot and a big brigadier's wig. He was, however, a gentler parent than his wife, whom he rebuked for break[ing] the spirits of my young troops. When he died, aged seventy-six, on 20 February 1768, Alison Cockburn wrote a letter of sympathy to the young Anne Lindsay (later AB) and her governess Henrietta Cumming, which called him my patriarch and our patriarch.

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.

MB was taught by governesses before she attended school. She attributed her love of theatre to her governess, Miss Richardson (Lizzie Dixie ), whose father had been the co-lessee, with Richard Brinsley Sheridan , of a London theatre.

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.

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.

EF did not attend school, but read in complete freedom from adult control. She read Philip Sidney 's Arcadia before the age of ten. Her father used to give each of his children a new book after Sunday dinner every week. Reading gave her an education of extraordinary richness and variety. Her mother encouraged her children's role-playing, and EF found herself half-absorbed in multitudinous Other Selves. Her formal education was supplied by governesses, of whom Miss Newman, the last, was admired and respected. Nevertheless, she later felt that the family had been too inward-looking, and that this had prevented her from getting to grips with life beyond.

Until spring 1819, when she was six, the family of Georgiana Leveson-Gover (later GF ) was resident at Tixall Hall in Tixall, Staffordshire, the place of her birth. Her father had rented the Hall (of which only an elaborate gatehouse dated 1580 now survives), an estate formerly the home of the Aston family. The Astons, who were Roman Catholics, were the centre in the early seventeenth century of a remarkable literary coterie, including the poets Gertrude (Aston) Thimelby and Katherine (Thimelby) Aston and the manuscript collector Constance (Aston) Fowler . In later years Fullerton would connect her early time at Tixall with her eventual conversion to Roman Catholicism.

Dorothea's early education by governesses took place at home.

As was usual for her time and class, Elinor's mother and stepfather employed a series of governesses to teach her and her sister. In later life Elinor wrote, I cannot remember learning anything of value from any of them, except perhaps from the French master. Her other subjects were mathematics, geography, and spelling.

EGB was educated at home by governesses. From about 1882, she was taught by her favourite governess, Miss Noel (nicknamed Squidge). This governess introduced her to Greek, Latin, and Italian art, for which Eva developed strong passions.