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.

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.

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.

In this re-writing 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 governess Miss 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.

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.

DA was taught at home by governesses (seven successively before she was sent to school), who followed a correspondence course designed for home schooling which was known as Parents Educational National Union . A French governess imposed rules which, however, did not seem oppressive; but the call of outdoor or individual life (riding or writing poetry) ensured that learning remained a burden (particularly mathematics, or sums). DA mentions with characteristic dryness the different books that were significant in her development: Kipling 's The Jungle Book (which affected her when she was very young), and the Bible from which her grandmother read aloud. At eleven she had read most of George Meredith ; at thirteen she discovered a contraception manual belonging to her mother, Planned Parenthood by Marie Stopes , which she found highly instructive; and a little later she discovered a more raunchy attitude to sex in six volumes of ballads among her grandfather's books. At fourteen she received as a gift from her boyfriend, Paul, copies of Oscar Wilde 's works and T. S. Eliot 's poems.

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.

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.

During her stay with her father, she was educated by a governess, Miss Newton, and spent her evenings learning botany.

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.

JB was educated primarily at home by a governess, her parents, and their friends and acquaintances. She studied both Italian and English literature. At some point during her life she also became fluent in French. Her mother often listened to the children reading aloud and then tested them on the subject-matter. She also encouraged them to develop their artistic talents. Josephine studied and played the piano.

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.

EC was educated by governesses and tutors at home. Governesses taught her history, geography, mathematics, and literature in creative ways: through games and dramatisations, for instance. Later on, different instructors taught her Latin, Euclidean geometry, algebra, history, Greek, French, and Italian. She was said to speak and read both French and German perfectly.Tennyson was quite impressed with EC 's knowledge of languages.

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 .

CC never went to school; instead, she and her sisters were taught by a series of governesses who she never loved. Her education was not particularly religious: she was not exposed to Bible stories until the age of seven. In later childhood, however, she was required to memorize long passages of scripture. She spent a great deal of time in her father's library, where she discovered Sir Walter Scott and Thomas Carlyle , whom she considered the great educators of her childhood.CC 's mother emphasized the importance of music and theatre by frequently taking her to concerts and performances. Clara went on to sing in a choir and play violin in an orchestra.

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.