Each tale has a fairly distinct plot, while the central characters and the setting (an eponymous country estate in Sussex) remain unchanged. The somewhat sarcastic and prickly protagonist-narrator, Honor Haig, takes a job as governess (of what the Athenæum describes as the Jane Eyre type) for nine-year-old Effie Wynter, and becomes acquainted both with the family and with their social circle. The first story focuses on the eldest Wynter daughter, the frivolous and insincere Helen, who is engaged to the doting Mr Beresford. Helen provokes Honor's disapproval by flirting with the visiting Captain Carlyon, but Honor also seems unsure of Beresford's credentials as a suitor, describing her sense that there was so much of the weakness of a woman in him, that I always felt instinctively that he was not fit, like other men, to bear and struggle with his griefs alone. This scene launches a recurrent theme in GC 's work: that of men whose love of, and failure to exercise a manly control over, strong women feminises them. In this case, Helen's flirtation has tragic consequences, as Beresford believes her to be false, and shoots himself. Traumatised, Helen is eventually redeemed by a renewed faith in God and a new life devoted to faith, obedience, endurance.

She worked a number of jobs that included teaching (she was a governess who attended her pupils by the day and did not live in), jewelry-making, and needlework. In the 1840s she was making about sixty pounds a year by her teaching. Driven by financial need, she also began writing, mainly for periodicals that would pay her for contributions. In 1842 she began work as an assistant editor for Friendship's Offering; this was the first of several editorial positions. Working after her marriage for The Keepsake, she was almost solely responsible for corresponding with authors such as Thackeray , Anna Maria Hall , Tennyson , and theBrownings , and for correcting proofs of their work.

The mode is that of Ann Radcliffe . The names of the characters are all Italian, though the French or Spanish setting implied by the title is reflected in the appearance in the text of French and Spanish armies. The hero and heroine, Alphonso and Victoria, brother and sister, had parents whose virtues are an exception in their dissolute family. Their father, the second to die, bequeathed the care of his little children to relations whose worthlessness he was unaware of. (The opening pages describe with gusto the return home of Duchess Elvira, the children's aunt, with a flashy new second husband to the family castle, where faithful servants are mourning the death of her first husband. The castle's name, Manfredo, sounds like a tribute to Walpole 's Otranto.) Cuthbertson makes an ironic gesture towards didacticism here, by skipping over any detail of the children's education (by a governess, Ursuline Farinelli, and a learned priest, Ludovico Alberti) to land them at young adulthood faultless as nature and their able instructors could make them. Once grown up they meet a melodramatic sea of troubles. While her brother joins the Spanish army for war against Britain, Victoria fights off unwanted suitors, endures the unexplained fury of her aunt, resists a forced marriage, and is packed off to a convent. At the end of volume one she is wondering whether, incarcerated amid horrors, she can with due delicacy and propriety agree to meet with a male stranger who may be able to help. Sister and brother, however, win through to happy endings in suitably flowery style.

Henry Fothergill Chorley in the Athenæum faulted the book as being something close to a textbook under the guise of entertainment. Young people, he argued, resent such books as engines of oppression. Furthermore, he compares ABE to her disfavour with other practitioners of her chosen genre: Maria Edgeworth (of Early Lessons) and Priscilla Wakefield (of The Juvenile Travellers), both books dating from 1801, and the more recent Kate Taylor . By calling the tutor in Edwards's book Mr. Teachum, he even implicitly refers back to the mother of children's didactic literature, Sarah Fielding , whose The Governess dated from more than a hundred years before.

Here she boarded uncomfortably with publisher John Chapman (who was not yet thirty). She had an intense relationship with him, his wife Susanna (who was older than her husband, and supplemented the family income by taking in lodgers), and his mistress (the children's governess), Elisabeth Tilley . Her biographer Rosemary Ashton believes it likely that GE and Chapman were at least briefly lovers. That summer she spent back with the Brays but she then returned to Chapman's house until October 1853.

EF 's novel Brave Old Woman fictionalises her governess Miss Newman and recreates her family as the Farrars.

Set on a River Murray sheep and cattle station named Wabong, My Lady Jane is a story of class and appearance in rural Australia. The station owner, Denis O'Brien, has been unaffected by his new wealth, while his wife, originally a vulgar illiterate woman, is now the very essence of purse-proud ignorance. The propriety of the new governess, Mrs Ellis, immediately pits Mrs O'Brien against her, while her manners and example prove an improving influence with the daughter of the house. Soon, Mrs Ellis's past is revealed: she is the secret wife of the aristocratic neighbouring land-holder. She married him privately many years ago in England without her father's consent; the father separated them; the husband emigrated; and she has travelled from England to find him once more. The pair are soon remarried, and Mrs O'Brien is much humbled by her treatment of the woman she believed to have been nothing but a governess.

Among KPF 's many cousins, her second cousin Abbie Hargrave (born Gertrude A. Frye ) was her close friend although she was seven years older. She and Kate shared their literary ambitions, but Abbie was poor and worked as a governess before beginning to publish her stories in magazines. She later wrote several novels (the second of which she dedicated to Kate) and played an active role in Kate's political development.

At the age of four Georgiana Leveson-Gower was placed, along with her elder sister Susan, under the tutelage of a Swiss governess, Eda Eward . Though their relationship was later affectionate, it was initially difficult. Craven suggests that the strict Mlle Eward's mismanagement of her young pupil created a sort of antipathy, which changed into warm attachment and the most sincere friendship as her pupil grew up. Fullerton describes herself as a very naughty child, with very little conscientiousness or sense of duty—kind-hearted and obliging enough, but ill-tempered, untruthful, disobedient, and idle, except when lessons amused me. History I liked, I detested arithmetic, and geography bored me.

Ruth Hilton is the beautiful orphaned daughter of a respectable farmer, who is placed by an uncaring guardian in a sweatshop as an apprentice milliner or seamstress. Assisting the ladies at a ball, she is admired, and eventually tricked and seduced by a gentleman, Henry Bellingham, who abandons her after he falls ill and is too weak to stand up to his dominating mother. Ruth is rescued on the point of suicide by the disabled dissenting minister Thurstan Benson (literally at this moment fallen man). He and his practical sister Faith (a more masculine character than the brother feminised by his disability and his intellect) introduce Ruth into their home and community as a young widow, Mrs Denbigh. After her son is born and she has been educated, she becomes governess to a wealthy and self-righteous member of Benson's congregation. The seducer Bellingham reappears under the name Mr Donne as parliamentary candidate in the constituency; Ruth refuses to marry him. When her identity is exposed and she is cast off by her employer, she heroically nurses the community through a typhus fever epidemic, only to take ill and die herself after responding to Bellingham's plea that she should nurse him.

Her mother, born (Mary) Elizabeth Gervais, an archdeacon's daughter, died early, leaving Melesina to be brought up by others, who included a harsh governess and two aged grandfathers in succession.

This book opens by looking back just over a century, when John Stuart Mill presented petitions to parliament on behalf of women's suffrage in 1866 and 1867. It relates the story of the suffragist movement, paying due attention to Emmeline Pankhurst and possibly more than her due to Emily Davison , who threw herself under the king's horse on Derby Day. The book comes close enough to the present day to mention the very early career of Germaine Greer .

The governess who most influenced VT 's childhood, the staunchly Republican Hélène Claissac , arrived when Violet was ten years old. She was later described by her pupil as my first (and salutory) contact with French intellectual integrity.

AT 's novel Marling Hall (finished that February) centred on a governess, Miss Bunting, known as Bunny, whom she had modelled on an actual Miss Bennet, known as Benny, whom she had met at Bere Court in Hampshire.

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.

After her father died her mother engaged a governess, a Mrs Parish, to make up for lost time in inculcating accomplishments and social graces. Mrs Parish stayed on in the family after her pupil's marriage, and although their relations had sharply deteriorated, MEBCS paid her the huge sum of £2,000 shortly after her first husband's death, possibly as some kind of blackmail.

The fourth novel by MS , Nine Coaches Waiting, was a governess novel, which has drawn comparisons with Daphne du Maurier 's Rebecca and Charlotte Brontë 's Jane Eyre.

AS does not seem to have had any formal education. If her upbringing was like that of her younger sister Katherine, she never attended school, and it is unclear whether she or her sisters had a governess, although the family nurse, Lucy Goldsmith , was a lasting influence. The family was a very musical one, and word games were a common pursuit (as was riding). Her mother's literary and artistic activities meant that the family also had literary visitors, including Anthony Trollope and George Meredith .

Freya had a German governess until the age of eight, and then an Italian governess who stayed until she was fourteen. More importantly, Freya was close to her grandmother Madeleine Stark , who read to her regularly. FS recalls in Traveller's Prelude: The book of Genesis, myths of Greece, the Siegfried Sagas, the Seven Kings of Rome, Tasso , Dante , Goethe , came to me in this good way . . . modulated with a voice that meant safety and kindness.

DS and her brother, George, first attended a dame-school before being educated at home by their mother and an aunt. When DS turned seventeen, her parents took on a governess to teach her.

ES ' early education was primarily domestic. Her father employed Adele Piquet , a French-Swiss governess who spoke no English, to educate Emily and Maria . The girls' mother also read to them and taught them needlepoint.

She was about to take up a position as a governess. On 15 December Mary and Percy Shelley learned of the suicide of his first wife, Harriet.