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.

EMD was educated privately by a series of French governesses, whose teaching was reinforced by family members who were bilingual in French.

EAD was educated at home by private tutors and governesses.

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.

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.

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.

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.

EG and her siblings were educated by a succession of nurses and governesses, with whom their relations were not affectionate or. sometimes, kind. One of the governesses, Miss Gardiner, they saw fit to ignore. One day they tied her to her desk and chair while she sat laboriously writing a letter. Another unwanted teacher was disposed of through the children's machinations. They contrived to have the teacher beat EG just as another sibling drew their father into hearing range; he fired the violent tutor on the spot. Other tutors included Mr Blake, who taught the Grant children dancing, and Mrs Bianchi, who taught them singing.

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).

AG and her sisters received little formal education; their lessons took second place to their brothers'. Under her evangelical mother's strict supervision, they were taught by a succession of governesses and tutors, who schooled them in reading, French, and the Bible. In her autobiography AG remarked that the exciting stories of her nurse, Mary Sheridan , had a far greater impact on her than did the procession of amiable incompetent governesses from whom she received her formal schooling. She also commented that her mother did not consider book learning as of any great benefit to girls but cared only about [r]eligion and courtesy, and holding themselves straight. The girls were forbidden to read novels until they reached the age of eighteen, a rule for which AG said she was afterwards grateful, for coming later they never won her heart and all her romantic sympathies were kept for Ireland. she nevertheless developed a strong love of books, and was particularly drawn to Lalla Rookh by Thomas Moore (a poem her mother deemed inappropriate for young girls) and a volume of English ballads. One Christmas the children received Chambers's Encyclopedia of English Literature, which AG remembered as a particularly important and influential text in her self-education—particularly in what it said of Malory 's Le Morte D'Arthur. Another highly influential text was the Globe edition of Shakespeare , in a copy which she bought for herself at the age of eighteen.

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.

JEH 's father, Charles Harrison , was a Hull timber merchant trading with Russia. In 1855 he married the young Welsh governess he had recently taken on, Gemimi Meredith , whose volatility, strictness, and previous status as an employee caused conflicts between her and the three children of his first marriage.

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.

In an education which was that of the average girl of her day (of a certain class), she was taught by a series of governesses, and was submissive and uninterested in her lessons at least until the age of thirteen Both music and art were taught her from that age by an Austrian woman, Fräulein Oser , who visited the family to give lessons, and who inculcated a lasting love of these subjects.CLwas not given to intellectual pursuits, and any mental development she made was owed to personal contacts. By 1906, when she was thirty-nine and first heard about the women's suffrage movement, she had no training for independent life.