Damaris Cudworth (later DM ) probably met John Locke about 1681. They began a correspondence the following year, and their friendship lasted until Locke's death. He soon began calling her his Governess—perhaps jokingly, since their letters are often playful—that is, his teacher.

In the year she died at least three little children's books by EKM were printed at York with woodcuts by Thomas Bewick : Lessons of Truth, Anecdotes of the Clairville Family, and Ellinor; or, The Young Governess: a Moral Tale.

Lady Sharington employed a governess named Hamblyn for her daughters, who was a niece of her husband. Mrs Hamblyn took great pains with the character and moral training of her charges, and taught Grace some basic medical skills as well as needlework, letter-writing, and arithmetic. The girls loved her, and loved to spend their time in her company. Their mother, too, inculcated moral lessons like indifference to fine clothes and jewels. Whereas Mrs Hamblyn encouraged Grace to read books on herbal medicine (by William Turner ) and surgery (by Giovanni da Vigo , translated by Bartholomew Traheron ), Lady Sharington (like critics of the novel two hundred years later) thought it ever dangerous to suffer young people to read or study books wherein was good and evil mingled together. She restricted Grace's reading to very few books: the bible and prayer book, Musculus ' Common Places (translated by John Man ), Foxe 's Book of Martyrs (which included writings by some women, such as Anne Askew ), and the Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis . The Sharington children also received instruction from unidentified pious men and preachers who visited at their house. Stories of corporal punishment inflicted on them are unfounded.

EMM 's third child was a daughter, Edris Mary Moore, born at Bromley in 1898. In the novel she is called Joy, and as a baby quickly achieves ascendancy over her elder brothers. At four she is allowed to sit in on their lessons, because the governess, Flora Keynes, who in general dislikes girls, agrees that she does not have a whiny voice. EMM later wrote that her house was one of gender equality.Joy becomes an energetic and sporty girl (at field hockey, cricket, and bicycling, changing a wheel as necessary). During the war she questions her brother about his capacity to kill with a bayonet. She performs staunchly in her own war work and is toughened by it. She later married and had two children.

The title-page quotes Dryden . The story opens in Scotland, twenty miles from Glasgow, with the humble clergyman Dr Woodville giving reluctant permission for his unsophisticated young daughter, Anna, to attend a charity ball. There is a mystery about Anna's birth: she is sometimes Miss Woodville, sometimes Miss Danvers. At the ball she outshines the Miss Dashwoods and captivates the eligible Captain Aubery, whom all the Miss Dashwoods are after. Anna has not their advantages, and has to become a governess (painlessly, since her employers are kind). But a slightly unpleasant element of female competitiveness with the Miss Dashwoods persists to the end of the novel, when Anna is at last united with Aubery, who by now is Lord Dunbevan and heir to a castle. Throughout the story she is contrasted not only with the Dashwood women but also with Lady Emily, a coquette or rattle whose fashionable lifestyle turns night into day, but who has a warm heart and becomes Anna's friend. Lady Emily is a devotee of Ossian , of Mont Blanc (which teaches human beings the lesson of their own futility), and of the gothic. While staying at Fergus Castle she explores extensively and is disappointed when she could meet with nothing to appal or horrify her, and she was compelled to own, with a sigh, she had made no discoveries by which she might hope to have edited nine volumes octavo, detailing the horrible mysteries of Fergus Castle, or the bugaboo of the north-west-by-north tower.

According to the extensive records kept by her mother, Grisell Baillie , the education of both the Baillie girls, Grisell and Rachel, was generously sponsored by their parents, who hired a number of tutors over the years. Grisell Baillie's accounts state that a full-time governess of good family, Miss May Menzies , was engaged in 1705 and remained with the family until her death, teaching two generations of children. While in charge of Grisell and Rachel she had a basic annual salary of eight pounds, six shillings and eightpence sterling (or its equivalent, one hundred pounds Scots) with extra payment for extraordinary services like nursing the children when they were ill. Grisie, as she is referred to in her mother's accounts, had reading, writing, geography, arithmetic, and French lessons from various tutors from the time she was four. She also attended dancing lessons, and was trained in the spinet, viol, virginal, and harp. Her mother's editor Robert Scott-Moncrieff wrote that Grisell was an accomplished singer, who would draw tears from the eyes of her audience.

Eglantine is coming from rural retirement with her mother to stay with her snobbish aunt Lady Winterton, and is quite new to all the politics of private life. She observes the unhappy fate of Miss Vernon, a humble companion whose smarmy character has been shaped by her job, and makes a friend of a governess, Matilda Brooks or de Broke, who becomes a secondary heroine. Once separated from Eglantine, her mother reveals her past life and sufferings in a letter: her husband (himself born illegitimate and growing up full of pride and anger) gambled, drank, whored, and abandoned her. After the birth of their baby he persuaded her once again to leave her family (who had taken her in) for him, but after fourteen months of happiness he started gambling again and departed to America.

As copyist, she transcribed her father's work without editing. He had last copied out a whole play in 1781, and had been virtually blind for a decade when his four-volume Dramatic Works appeared in 1798, Prepared for the press by the author. This suggests that Adelaide must have played a major role as editor. She also probably worked intermittently as a governess.

LMA began working at an early age to help support her family. She accepted whatever she could find and worked as a governess, editor, teacher, seamstress, paid companion, and domestic. It was her work as a writer, however, that finally led her family to financial security.

You've Got to Have Gold is set high in the Swiss Alps, at a hotel run by the protagonist, Elissa, and her husband, Mario. The gold of the title is forgiveness: Elissa learns to forgive both the driver of the other car in the accident which kills Mario, and the overbearing housekeeper at the hotel, who reminds her of a bullying governess in her childhood. After these acts of forgiveness she feels her husband's continuing presence and continuing love.

EA met Hugh Walpole after receiving a fan letter he sent her in 1907. They met for tea at the Lyceum Club , a London women's social club that had been inaugurated by Constance Smedley in 1904 and to which Elizabeth belonged. Having accepted her offer of a position as tutor to her children, Walpole was, so the story goes, the victim of her practical joke when she met him at the railway station pretending to be the family governess, and pumped him on their drive to Nassenheide about opinions of her, Elizabeth, in England. Walpole worked while at Nassenheide on his first novel, Troy Hanneton, and much later, in 1941, he wrote EA 's obituary for the Daily Sketch.

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.

Lady Anne's father, James Lindsay , was the fifth Earl of Balcarres, an army officer, and a Jacobite. He married Anne Dalrymple when he was sixty. He is described as deaf, with a gouty foot and a big brigadier's wig. He was, however, a gentler parent than his wife, whom he rebuked for break[ing] the spirits of my young troops. When he died, aged seventy-six, on 20 February 1768, Alison Cockburn wrote a letter of sympathy to the young Anne Lindsay (later AB) and her governess Henrietta Cumming, which called him my patriarch and our patriarch.

In their youth both Montreithe's son and daughter mock him, but the care of other people enables them to grow up virtuous. Ariana is by nature physically active, honest and honourable; her beloved governess Mrs Kinloch teaches her to be civilised. Her father gets caught in France following the French Revolution, and she sets out intending to rescue him (and also her lover, Fitzosborne). En route from Manchester to Dover she is herself protected by a strong old countrywoman who is (in her son's words) not foolish; and if a body should affront you, she could give un a lick of the hand. . . . [S]he is a hearty old soul, and can saddle a horse, and is no more afeard of John Palmer's bull nor I be. The countrywoman seems designed to show that the English lower classes are not ripe for revolution, but AB depicts her as far from subservient. She is prepared, in her son's words, if any one goes for to be bould 'gainst Miss, [to] clout their heads earty [sic], and tell 'em outright zhe [sic] be meat for their maisters! An American republican met on the Channel crossing is also sympathetically portrayed.

GB 's step-mother published plays (after 1889) and novels, including The Story of Ursula (1895), with a governess heroine whose sexual liberation was considered offensive. Her non-fiction includes the classic At the Works: A Study of a Manufacturing Town (1907), which was reprinted in 1985.

The play critiques the unequal treatment in families of daughters and sons, and links sexual with economic exploitation of women. Three sisters work themselves to the bone—Ann as a seamstress, Norah as a governess, and Helen as a typist—to contribute to their brother's more leisured lifestyle. Helen, in particular, resents her self-sacrificing role and speaks out against it: It's the gospel of the generation that everything must be done for the boy—the son—he's the rare and precious individual in a country where there are more than a million superfluous women! When her boss's sexual harassment becomes intolerable at work, Helen decides to emigrate to Canada using her portion of her grandfather's estate, but she finds that her plans conflict with her brother's. Cyril, a dapper conceited youth (and the apple of the title), gains his father's permission to use his sisters' money to secure a business partnership as leverage for a financially advantageous love match. As usual, the daughters' interests are sacrificed for the son's.

After that, she was educated by a governess.

LSB was probably educated at home by a governess. Much of what she was taught is unknown, but Hermia Oliver , historian of the anarchist movement, refers to her as well educated. She had dancing lessons, and her father, Alexander Bevington , encouraged her to observe nature seriously, and also supported her poetry writing. She could read both German and French, and possibly some Arabic: the cover title of her second poetry collection, Poems, Lyrics, and Sonnets, is partly in Arabic, as is the title of the opening poem, Subh-I-Kazib.

Lucy spent most of her childhood with her siblings, cared for by a nurse, under-nurse and governess in the third-floor nursery. Their Sunday play consisted of reading the New Testament, Bunyan (Pilgrim's Progress, and Foxe (from his Book of Martyrs) and of playing a game based on the hymn Onward Christian Soldiers marching as to war in and out of the small inlaid tables, singing as we went. Daily life in the nursery was much less formidable.

During her early childhood, EB was instructed by a governess. Her mother told Elizabeth that she employed the governess because she could not bear to scold her herself. Elizabeth was not allowed to learn to read until she was seven years old because her mother felt that Bowens tended to overwork themselves. Once she began reading, she read voraciously, while maintaining her early enjoyment of being read to.

CB 's writing slipped from the public eye, as scholar Kathleen Hickok points out, after her husband's death. In 1933, however, Janet E. Courtney remarked that Bowles was both interesting and typical. Left in indigence, the first thought of this solitary girl was not, as it would have been in Victorian days, Shall I go out as a governess? but Shall I try my fate as a poet? She was lucky in that she found a powerful friend, but that her venture was not foolhardy is shown by the fact that her success was shared by others, less friended and with lesser gifts. Then, as now, a personal introduction counted for much. . . . Caroline . . . might have bloomed, a violet by a mossy stone, as unknown as she was sweet and fragrant, had not Southey found her out and brought her into the Lakeland garden of poets.

View reference

Courtney, Janet E. The Adventurous Thirties: A Chapter in the Women’s Movement. Oxford University Press, 1937.

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Late twentieth-century scholars rediscovered her work and placed her among the important Romantic poets.

Be Sure Your Sex Will Find You Out is a delightful romp which takes place in the foyer of a London cinema where a mass gathering of women is about to pay homage to a deceased film-star, Redmond Maraschino, the life's blood of the silver screen, donor of happiness to countless millions, supreme among actors, mightiest of lovers . . . ineffably beloved. Those who love him are female, including 800,000 American women, 700,000 London women, a million and a half schoolgirls, etc. Each of these groups of women has sent a representative to the ceremony. The only unbeliever present is Lesley Davidson, governess and chaperone to the schoolgirl representative, who as a feminist believes that such worship by women of a man is indecent . . . undignified . . . degrading. When, however, the dead idol's mother, Mrs Murphy (Maraschino was a screen name), arrives from Ireland, her conscience reproaches her for the lies she has promised to tell for the price of ten pounds, and she tells the truth. Redmond never existed—or rather, he was a girl, though she was always a tomboy and a headstrong critter, full o' blarney and queer ways. She niver could abide petticoats, and when she went off to Ameriky it was in a pair of her brother Michael's trousers, and he swearing and cursing because he'd not a pair to put on. But Mrs Murphy is drunk: the horrified inner circle of worshippers cancel her from the public programme and swear to hush up her revelations and steadfastly to maintain their faith. Only Lesley Davidson, coming forward as the others pass into the auditorium, drinks to Maraschino's portrait in full understanding, with the words: My heroine!

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

Whereas the two Brett boys were sent off to boarding school for a formal education, Dorothy and Sylvia were taught at home, leading a starkly sheltered existence that, Brett believed, arrested their maturation. After the girls' governess was dismissed (because her nose twitched, and annoyed Lord Esher), their education was mainly undertaken by their mother, who seemed to take little interest in it. The Brett girls recalled their attendance at dancing lessons held for Princess Beatrice 's children (at which their grandmother Queen Victoria was often in attendance) as their foremost interaction with other children. After such isolation, the arrival of the Ranee of Sarawak, Margaret Lili Alice de Windt Brooke , was a significant moment for Dorothy as well as her sister. Under Margaret's auspices Dorothy joined a small orchestra as a drummer and was introduced as a prospective wife to Margaret's eldest son, the future Raja, though in the event it was Sylvia who married him. Margaret, Lady Brooke, was by this date living separated from her husband, and Dorothy Brett was fascinated by her; she became a staple in the Brooke household and demonstrated great affection for the older woman that, according to Hignett, lasted almost the length of the Edwardian decade. Through Margaret, too, Brett was introduced to the naturalist and writer W. H. Hudson , whose ambiguous heritage (he claimed native descent, though he was actually born of non-indigenous Americans in Argentina) inspired in Brett a romantic vision of Native American culture. This impression eventually re-surfaced in Brett's works created in New Mexico, which constitute the major part of her artistic legacy.