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.

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

A subsidiary drama builds around the efforts of Inez to be allowed to nurse her delirious husband. The surgeon rejects her help, but she gets the nurse, Mrs Crane (who is forty-five, masculine-looking, strongminded, kind-hearted, conscientious, a working woman with some of the characteristics of a working-class man), knowingly but secretly to introduce her as her assistant. Nursing by Inez is good for the desperately sick Harry; it is her father the admiral, visiting, whose furious tirades against his supposedly absent daughter cause the patient's temperature to soar so that he dies of fever. Inez lives on under another assumed identity: visiting Englishmen observe her a decade later at Naples, acting as just the governess of two adolescent girls, actually her daughters. She goes under the name of Madame St Aulaire, which one of the observers says is like a name out of the stories of Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis . (The reference conveys an irony, since Mme de Genlis, who authored moral texts and was received with respect in England, had been a royal mistress.) Social convention forbade AM to create a happy ending for her unchaste heroine, but she goes as far as she can. Inez is left alive and not separated from her daughters, and we are explicitly told that they both get good husbands.

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.

BRP delivered a paper before the Social Science Congress on the plight of underpaid governesses.

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 .

In 1850, AP was among the first students to attend Queen's College for women students. One of the teachers here was Charles Kingsley , and it has been argued that she was more influenced by his Christian Socialism than by the Tractarianism to which some attribute her conversion to Catholicism. She was one of the first students who attended Bedford College for Ladies, a school for training governesses.

Taught by governesses until she was thirteen, Margaret Haig Thomas learned to read at about five. She was taught German and French, and she also learned Welsh as a child but did not retain it in adulthood. She wrote that she learnt what trifles I did from governesses.Margaret's aunt Charlotte Haig , who had wanted to be a doctor and who, in the absence of formal education, made do by reading science books, drew her niece's attention to Arnold 's poetry and Gibbon 's history. Margaret also enjoyed Kipling 's The Jungle Book and Stevenson 's Ballads. She read, with the digestion of a shark,Charles Kingsley , Sir Walter Scott , Byron , Browning , Tennyson , Anthony Hope , and John Stuart Mill . She thought compulsory reading of Shakespeare and the Bible unreasonable.

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.

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.

VSW was educated at home by a series of governesses until she was thirteen.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 was educated at home by governesses. She enjoyed music and painting, but did little reading and a good deal of running wild outdoors.

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.