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.

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.

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 .

MA , whose work spans the Romantic and Victorian periods, was a poet who wrote wittily on religious and secular topics, and was an early champion of the governess. With Felicia Hemans , she was the one of the two most prolific British contributors to annuals in the USA.

In this rewriting of history, the Hanoverian dynasty never held the throne. (Neither did the Old Pretender, for a James III sits on the throne in the 1830s.) In later books we learn that the Roman Empire once extended to America (where Latin is still spoken here and there in isolated areas) and England and France have already been joined by a Channel Tunnel.The Wolves of Willoughby Chase is an adventure story of gothic flavour, set in Yorkshire . Good triumphs over evil, represented on the one hand by the wolves (which early in the story are ravening without control through the countryside in their hundreds but which, improbably, move away spontaneously when spring arrives) and on the other hand by the wicked governessMiss Slighcarp and her accomplices. Pitted against her are the young cousins Bonnie and Sylvia Green, and a boy who lives in a cave, named Simon.

Agnes, the first-person narrator, has grown up cherished by a businessman father who loses everything just before his death. She sets herself to earn a living by teaching music, but cannot resist the pressure of her mother and all her relations to accept a marriage proposal from the rich and hateful Mr Millar. As she says much later: It is hard to convey . . . an idea of the helplessness of poor women . . . . It was hard to refuse when self-sacrifice was demanded.After years of psychological torment (and after her mother has died) she stages a fake death in a crevasse on a climbing holiday in the Alps, flees her marriage, and travels to Canada as a governess under an assumed name. Years later she meets again her first love, army officerReginald Leigh. She first discusses her past with him, then refuses to marry him while her distant husband lives. No sooner is she widowed than Reginald too dies—heroically, defending women and children from being burned alive by States-men or sympathisers on a punitive expedition against Canadians who harbour runaway slaves from the USA.

PA (who writes, I suppose I was quite an intelligent little girl) began learning to read from coloured letters by the age of four. At six she read her first story-book to herself without reading aloud, and wrote her first essay (on William the Conqueror). Her first teaching came from her nanny, who doubled as a governess, with whom at eight she was learning French, elementary geometry and vulgar fractions . . . . history, nature-study and long division. Her brothers went to boarding school at seven, as was normal practice in her class, but having her taught by nanny was an economy. She felt that she paid a price, in loneliness and monotony, for her solo education.

Apart from a year when she was sent away to a convent at seventeen, DA was largely educated at home, at first by a governess along with her sisters. Daisy, Vera and Angie had a desire to attend school, and wanted the opportunity to explore new surroundings and make new friends. After lessons with the governess ended, they started to leave the house to take lessons with Miss Mabel Smythe , who was the daughter of a Lewes doctor and a local teacher. They took lessons in a small group, along with the rector's daughter and two other friends. The children collaborated on a play based on Cinderella, which they performed in the Lewes church hall. After this Daisy wrote a play which they also performed: A Woman's Crime.

Her education under her next governess, Squidge (an Austrian called Miss Fraulein by everyone but Cynthia), was a quite different matter: Beauman writes that Squidge had a heart but no mind. Nevertheless, by sixteen Cynthia had acquired fluency in German and French, and had read the whole of Shakespeare . All this, however, was done on sufferance. It was axiomatic that to educate the female beyond a certain point was to damage her marriage chances, and when Cynthia began Greek lessons in 1905, her mother made the condition that no-one was to know about them.

She had a governess, Miss A. M. Bullen (who was capable of bearing her part in the family verse-writing), and a nurse of whom she was very fond, who had previously worked for her mother. Her father influenced her love of science and photography; together they undertook numerous scientific and photographic experiments. She inherited from him a facility at working with her hands.

The Watsons are not merely short of money but stand a little lower in the ranks of the middle class than any other of Austen's central families. The eldest sister believes, like Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice, that a loveless marriage would be preferable to the bleak prospect of working as a governess.

Eccentric Mrs St Maugham (owner of the garden on cold and grudging chalk soil, whose poor growing qualities are the play's central symbol) takes on Miss Madrigal as governess to her grand-daughter, Laurel, precisely because Madrigal has no references. A visiting judge then identifies her as a woman he sentenced fifteen years back for murder. But her past struggles and suffering enable her to benefit the child, who feels stifled in the world she knows. Madrigal eventually succeeds in introducing a new gardening system to replace the outworn ideas upheld by the family's disabled butler, Pinkbell, who exerts control without ever appearing on stage. The play is full of absurd moments reminiscent of Chekhov or Katherine Mansfield .

Back in England as a widow with two small children, she found herself badly off, a situation not improved by the collapse of the Stewart family fortunes in Jamaica, but her biographer has found no evidence of her taking paid work at this stage, either as a governess or a writer.

After a stint as a governess, AB decided she could afford the rental of a house in Colby Road, Upper Norwood, for herself, Mabel , and a maid.

Enid had had a special bond with her father, Thomas Carey Blyton, ever since he was believed to have saved her life by holding her in his arms all night when she was a small baby with a dangerous case of whooping cough. He would tell her stories, take her on walks, and generally foster her development. It was a severe blow to her when he vanished from his children's lives. When he reappeared to visit and take Enid for occasional treats, her enjoyment of these excursions was spoiled by the knowledge that he was living with another woman. He died suddenly of a heart attack while she was working as a nursery-governess, and she did not go to his funeral.

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.

She performed in Liverpool as well as York. Wilkinson wrote unflatteringly of her in his memoirs, as did William Beloe. John Nichols thought well of her talents, though he called her wayward and eccentric, in his Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century.David Erskine Baker in the 1812 edition of Biographia Dramatica said she performed with force and discrimination. After leaving the stage she went to work as a governess.

AB remained silent about her brief foray into paid work, as a governess. At Bolton Le Moors she began keeping house for her brother Walter. She worked as a conservationist to preserve various monuments, and as a tireless committee woman on behalf of the YWCA and of Coventry Cathedral. In 1914 she was elected to the committee of Coventry's Natural History and Scientific Society . Walter became a Vice-President of the society at this time, and later she became its first woman Vice-President. This led in turn to her becoming a founder member of the Coventry City Guild . The guild concerned itself with the preservation of history: AB (a great collector of objects) donated to its museum a pair of gloves worn by George Eliot . During the First World War it managed a scheme for growing vegetables in allotments, while AB herself worked in a creche for the children of munitions workers. In 1924, at her urging, the guild established an annual Education Week.

When she was old enough, Mary took over some of the instruction of the younger pupils at her father's school. From 1827 she worked as a governess and from 1829 as a teacher in a girls' school run by her mother and sisters.

Lady Powis , governess to the infant Prince of Wales , brought the baby to the king with Elizabeth Cellier 's Foundling Hospital petition in his hand.

These anecdotes are indeed genuine insofar as they feature a number of actual characters, notably Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis , Philippe duc d'Orléans , and their daughter or reputed daughter Pamela . These characters reflect, in the words of a reviewer, the frivolities of high life and the negligent gaiety of fashionable manners.. A heavily-plotted story opens with two girls of sixteen and seventeen being escorted to England by their governess. The fact that they are fleeing the Terror in France remains implicit. The romantic and mysterious Laure escapes from violence on her return to France by pretending to be English. Her identity is then resolved and she marries. Inheritance lost by a father's plotting is in due course restored.

AC addressed the earliest letter in her later printed collection (which is partly in verse) to Henrietta Cumming or Cummings (later Fordyce) , who was governess to Lady Anne Barnard and her sisters, and later a biographical subject for Isabella Kelly .

WC was first taught at home by his mother , a former governess. His later institutional schooling was interrupted by a two-year period in Italy and France, where he became fluent in French and Italian.