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

Forster, Antonia. Emails to Isobel Grundy about Thomas Holcroft.

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.

When the Morning Chronicle announced on January 30 her appointment as a sub-governess, ECK insisted on having the claim contradicted, as she was not a sub-governess but a lady companion to the Princess. This insistence on her status surfaced again in a letter written to the Prince Regent in April, in which she complained of her treatment since arriving at Windsor, specifically the Queen's reference to her as a sub-governess.

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. 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. Her travels with her father were also undertaken with educational aims: while abroad she worked at German, French, and Italian. 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.

HL had ten sisters and half-sisters. The sisters in Autobiography of a Child grew up without love or moral training, cuffed and scolded, allowed illimitable liberty from dawn to dark . . . more like boys than girls. One of the others became, like Hannah, a governess.

She was at first educated at home by thirteen successive governesses. Her mother sometimes read aloud to her daughters: R. D. Blackmore ' Lorna Doone and Anna Sewell 's Black Beauty. After meeting Hardy , Cecily read for herself Tess of the D'Urbervilles, which was too old for her but made her feel like an explorer She later remembered Octave Feuillet 's Le Roman d'un jeune homme pauvre as among the nicer parts of my schoolroom days.

SM was educated at home, where she and her siblings were taught the usual subjects such as writing, history, mathematics, and languages. She also studied music and painting. She speaks quite fondly of a particular governess they had later on, named Greg, who was apparently willing to interact with them on their own level as children and did not push adult standards on them. She made learning fun and interesting, and she believed in our capability, and this was such a new aspect of things that it almost required consideration. For the rest of her life, Sarah considered Greg gratefully as one of the most human as well as one of the most inspiring people I have ever met.

As a young girl Constance was educated by governesses at home. Initially, she was taught music, drawing, poetry, and some French. But she was encouraged by her last and favourite governess, Miss Noel (whom she called Squidge) to read French and German literature with rigour and appreciation. She also viewed her own painting with increasing seriousness.

Ellesmere recycles various elements from The Mysterious Wife. It opens dramatically with the Oxford-London stage-coach crashing and overturning. A woman is killed while her nine-month-old baby survives. A Mrs Davenport (an ex-governess, the childless widow of an East India Company officer) takes on the orphaned baby but fails to trace the identity of the mother. The child, Clement Davenport, grows up in ignorance of his origins, until an insult from a maid reveals to him the scandal that surrounded his adoption (all kinds of discreditable motives were attributed to his foster-mother). He contracts a secret marriage to a Swiss noblewoman, Baroness de Grand-Pré, and is himself revealed to be Earl of Ellesmere. But he loses track of his wife and their child in the political disruptions of Europe. Seeking them, he goes through the kind of degradation and suffering more characteristic of a female protagonist. He becomes a prisoner, then leads a fugitive life disguised as a priest, and reaches the verge of madness. His mind is finally restored, along with his family and his happiness, at the story's end.

EN was exposed to a range of Christian faiths. Though her mother was Episcopalian , the family attended a Presbyterian kirk (the Church of Scotland) for a time during Elma's early childhood. One of her governesses was strictly Low Church, and in adolescence Elma attended a Catholic convent for one year. Although she experienced many different denominations, she never fully accepted any one of them, because, she says, I did not care which was true. She does say that of all the faiths she was introduced to, she liked Catholicism the best, but not enough to do anything about it.

When the English court turned Catholic, Lady Powis served as lady-in-waiting to the queen, Mary of Modena . She was a witness to the birth of the king and queen's baby son , was appointed his governess (a post she retained for the rest of her life), and helped him to survive the dubious childcare practices of the time. With her husband and the royal family she left England for exile abroad, and she died on 11 March 1691.

KOB worked fairly briefly at a range of jobs: as a freelance journalist, reviewing for The Sphere in London; then working for C. P. Scott in the foreign-language department of the Manchester Guardian Weekly in Manchester; and as a teacher at a convent in Hampstead for the first part of 1921. While in the US, she worked as secretary to her brother-in-law . During her time in Spain she worked as governess to two children. After her marriage ended she became secretary and publications editor for the Sunlight League .

As copyist, she transcribed her father's work without editing. He had last copied out a whole play in 1781, and had been virtually blind for a decade when his four-volume Dramatic Works appeared in 1798, Prepared for the press by the author. This suggests that Adelaide must have played a major role as editor. She also probably worked intermittently as a governess.

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.

Beverly Lyon Clark , who wrote an introduction to this book and thought extremely highly of it, argued that the neglect of it stemmed from its belonging not just to one but to several under-appreciated genres, as a children's book and as a girls' school story. Clark situates this book in a tradition of school stories whose protagonists learn to exercise virtue not in the public world, like the boy heroes of Thomas Hughes or Rudyard Kipling , but in the world of home, like the girl protagonists of Sarah Fielding 's The Governess, Mary Wollstonecraft 's Original Stories from Real Life, Charles and Mary Lamb 's Mrs Leicester's School, or Harriet Martineau 's The Crofton Boys. She was bold enough to suggest that The Making of a School Girl is better (because less preachy, sentimental, or condescending) than Louisa May Alcott 's Little Women or Frances Hodgson 's The Secret Garden.

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.

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.

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.

Facing poverty and wishing to improve her status, HS began to write magazine stories. She and her sister Elizabeth also qualified as a governesses. Though Hesba's teaching was limited to Sunday School, Elizabeth became by 1867 a well-paid governess with an annual wage of £70.

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.

Initially, Angela was educated at home, where her mother began teaching her to read on her third birthday. She also had a succession of French and German governesses, who taught her French and German as a child. A friend gave her a set of Maria Edgeworth 's Early Lessons, in a very early edition with tiny steel engravings pasted in as vignettes for chapter headings.