Apart from this single year (and some very early time at a dame school), Mary Wright (later MS ) was educated at home. She had a governess who helped instill a love of history and poetry.

They taught all subjects except French and German. They later employed additional masters and a governess, and ES enlarged her house to accommodate their students.

These are scripts (not particularly remarkable) for private theatricals. The first one features a young man trying to outdo his mother at housekeeping, who is hoodwinked by the servants; another focuses on a wicked woman servant; and in still another a penniless woman poses as a governess to win the heart of her rich mother-in-law-to-be.

It was during this lean period that she began writing, teaching (she was probably though not certainly a governess, and possibly worked for Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire ), and acting.

While her four brothers were sent away to boarding school, IHR and her sisters were educated at home by a governess, who taught modern languages, arithmetic, and literature. It was the governess's responsibility to train the girls to become accomplished young ladies who could also dance, play the piano, sing and draw. Isabella grew restless with this form of education.

Their brothers went to school, but the Rigby girls were educated by governesses, and early on by tutors (who instructed them in French, Italian, and music). ER was still very young when the employment of tutors ceased, so she may not have had this form of teaching. After the family's move to Framingham, there was only one governess in the house.

EAP 's companion-governess, Elizabeth Appleton , went on to run her own school in Upper Portland Place, to publish half a dozen books of high calibre (from Private Education; or, A Practical Plan for the Studies of Young Ladies, 1815, to A Guide to the French Language, 1824), and to be interviewed for the post of governess to the future Queen Victoria .

This novel opens in an English vicarage garden, before a bundle of her own old letters transports the female narrator, Eleanor (then Miss Middleton), into the only eventful year of her life. She sees herself as plain and ordinary; she is now thirty-six, married to her Henry and mother of a small daughter. She was then already past thirty, working as a governess, and had chosen a position in the unimaginably exotic Galicia because she supposed that Henry, then a struggling barrister, might do better to marry a richer, more attractive woman who was also in love with him. This capacity for quixotism suggests hidden depths in Eleanor, but in the novel she is the voice of reason, as well as that of kindness and reliability, which she herself contrasts as English virtues with a Polish capacity for heroism.

A Drama in Blue may be read as having a feminist subtext. It opens on a pair of young lovers, Ilka and Wilhelm, spending an idyllic day together, from which she saves and presses a blue flower which he had likened to her eyes. A single shadow touches the otherwise perfect day, when he indicates that he likes her best inactive and ornamental. Their engagement is broken; years pass; he becomes a successful doctor, while she is forced to work as a governess until a legacy unexpectedly gives her freedom. She then seeks him out at his sanatorium, where he first fails to perceive that she is not merely the next patient on his list, then fails to recognize or remember the pressed flower, which crumbles to dust as she shows it to him. The moral seems to be that men forget while women remember; beneath it lies a hint that she has had a better life without him.

SG was initially educated at home by governesses, in part because of her father's objections to any form of religious education. His philandering ensured that governesses tended not to last very long. When SG was thirteen, one governess's suicide attempt prompted her parents to send her to school.

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.

SG 's preface puts her cards on the table as a political and social conservative. It says Reform, which seems now to be the present order of the day, whether in religion, politics, education, or dress, is due to nothing more reasonable than human fickleness. She has written, she says, to shew the folly of the hydra system of Reform. Methodism is a particular target. Yet she reminds her audience that Romance Readers had already noted that religion is not a suitable topic for a novel, and she makes a ritual gesture of female incapacity. Politics is too large a field for one of my sex to venture on; to submit without meanness, not to rule, is woman's province. She dislikes any relaxing of class hierarchy, and complains that shop-keepers' daughters (who ought, if they need work, to be milliners, mantua-makers, or ladies' maids) have a better chance at governess jobs than the genuine impoverished gentlewoman who is not young or beautiful. She also complains of degeneracy in the upper classes, who were once men of learning (where is a Bacon , a Clarendon , a Walpole , even a Chesterfield ?). She hates modern dress, and feels that love had more devotees when the personal attractions of women were more concealed, when something was left to the imagination of the opposite sex (whom we all wish to please, say what we will).

Maria and her sister Emily were largely educated by their French-Swiss governess, Adele Piquet , who spoke no English. Their mother taught them needlepoint while their father instructed them in astronomy and other sciences.

This was the outcome of the Meal Tub Plot, so called after the container in Elizabeth Cellier 's kitchen where evidence was planted. Lady Powis was then granted bail, and the charges against her were dropped. Under James II , by contrast, she not only rose with her husband in the scale of the nobility, but served as a courtier to Mary of Modena and in June 1688 was appointed governess to the newborn Prince of Wales . Her actions were crucial to this baby in two ways: she testified to his legitimacy and she was instrumental in getting him off pap (a concoction of cow's milk and gluten) and onto human milk. In this capacity, she followed her royal mistress into exile and she was still the prince's governess when she died on 11 March 1691.

Two years later her mother decided she should be educated at home, and sought out for that purpose her own former governess, Miss Cobham. Lessons lasted for three hours every morning. With Miss Cobham, Jane Howard read the whole of Shakespeare (and conceived the ambition of being an actress), wrote a stream of poems and stories, and struggled with grammar and algebra. She had a separate governess for French (which she refused to learn in any meaningful way), and other, specialised teachers for drawing, riding, needlework, and the piano. After a while two other girls came to join in her lessons.

When Elspeth first arrived in Kenya she spent most of her time with her governess, Miss Ross Hume. Her mother taught her to ride. Early during the First World War she and the governess (with whom her mother was not getting on) were sent away to stay with friends. After an unhappy spell in an English boarding school, her mother (who had high ability though nothing beyond secondary education) decided to teach her herself, with the next-door farmer taking over for mathematics and Latin.

The action of the story is told from the perspective of a naïve, unnamed governess who is convinced that her charges, Miles and Flora, can see, though they refuse to admit it, the ghosts of two former employees of the Bly estate, about whom there is suggestion of past sexual impropriety.

During his early life John Hartley remained at home (as opposed to the usual middle-class practice of sending sons to boarding school), and the Hartleys at first employed a nursery governess to educate him. Later he went to Cambridge University , where he qualified as a bacteriologist. ML , who saw the English educational system as far superior to the Irish, must have been delighted by this.

The publisher was again Mary Jane Godwin of the Juvenile Library Seven of the ten stories were by Mary; again the book bore only Charles's name (which has affected its listing in library catalogues). The dedication to the Young Ladies of Amwell School is signed M. B., initials which refer to a fictitious pupil-teacher at Amwell School, putative author of the book, an employee of the governess or headmistress. Scholar Janet Bottoms points out that the name Amwell covertly asserts the author's sanity (the kind of pun that Charles Lamb delighted in). This book went through nine editions by 1825, and has continued to be reprinted almost up to the present day. The first US edition appeared in 1811.

The essay calls for government intervention to improve the status and the pay of women working as governesses. Like many earlier writers about midwifery, SL seeks to elevate the practice of governessing to the status of a women's profession comparable to male professions. Governesses, she argues, should work for a qualification which would be gained by public examination. Since she argues as one within and not without the pale, it seems that she had worked as a governess herself. Although she admits to having seen the profession only under its brightest aspect, she questions whether the tone of education, or the character of educators, [can] be raised, while society continues to offer to the members of this profession for their services—the wages and social position of a domestic, and for their distresses and old age—the provision of a pauper?

View reference

Lewis, Sarah. “On the Social Position of Governesses”. Fraser’s Magazine, Vol.

37

, 1848, pp. 411-14.

412

A shipwreck in 1855 has left survivors stranded on a Pacific coral island: they are some sailors and fifty orphans accompanied by governess Miss Charlotte Smith. When their descendants are rediscovered by the outside world about seventy years later they are living strictly according to a Victorian governess's code of behaviour. The satire on Victorian values applies also to the present day. This, RM later said, was the one of my novels I enjoyed writing most (except They Were Defeated) because I indulged in it my morbid passion for coral islands, lagoons, bread-fruit and coconut trees, and island fauna and flora.

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.

BM was tutress (that is, a female tutor, not a mere governess) to Princess Elizabeth , youngest daughter of Charles I .

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.