FAS was apparently educated by governesses until her elder sister's education was complete. With the boys away at boarding-school, however, her mother dispensed with the governess when Flora would have been the only pupil, to save money. Afterwards, her mother, who had taught her to read, also taught her to teach herself and did not censor the books available to her. (Her father did not concern himself with his children's education.)

At first Gladys was taught at home by governesses: the stout, comical angel Fräulein Sanders, followed by several lunatics, one elderly nymphomaniac (unsuccessful) and a prostitute (that is, a governess who was dismissed when a man was found in her bedroom). One of them killed herself two days after leaving the Stern household. Gladys was taught the piano, but not very successfully. One of the first storybooks she remembered was Mrs Molesworth 's "Carrots": Just a Little Boy. Other books of her childhood included two by Grace Aguilar (Home Influence and The Mother's Recompense), Charlotte Yonge 's The Daisy Chain, and Martha Finley 's Elsie Dinsmore books. Later she said she read and studied purely for pleasure—Literature. especially English Literature, History, Modern Languages—and later regretted never having been trained or compelled to read anything difficult.

The fourth novel by MS , Nine Coaches Waiting, was a governess novel, which has drawn comparisons with Daphne du Maurier 's Rebecca and Charlotte Brontë 's Jane Eyre.

After her father died her mother engaged a governess, a Mrs Parish, to make up for lost time in inculcating accomplishments and social graces. Mrs Parish stayed on in the family after her pupil's marriage, and although their relations had sharply deteriorated, MEBCS paid her the huge sum of £2,000 shortly after her first husband's death, possibly as some kind of blackmail.

According to the Gentleman's Magazine, EST had to set aside her own interests to serve as governess to the innumerable younger children in the family. The same article asserted that for the last seven years of her father's life (that is from 1798) she actually superintended his legal work. This seems to imply that she directed an office of legal clerks.

IT 's mother, Maud (Holt) Tree , taught classics at Queen's College , Harley Street and harboured the ambition of becoming an academic at Girton College . Her stage aspirations, however, won out over her academic interests, and she pursued an acting career instead. Her husband did not approve of her acting, though he cast her in roles and coached her throughout her career. Long after Tree's death, Maud wrote in a memoir about him, Herbert always adhered to his preference for my not going on the stage. There is so much else you could do, was ever his too-flattering comment. She never let his opinions on her acting dissuade her from following her chosen profession. She produced two plays at the Wyndham's Theatre, but both turned out unsuccessful. IT 's mother also hosted elaborately decorated, stylish dinner parties, that were attended by such eminent figures as the future Prime Minister Asquith .

This book opens by looking back just over a century, when John Stuart Mill presented petitions to parliament on behalf of women's suffrage in 1866 and 1867. It relates the story of the suffragist movement, paying due attention to Emmeline Pankhurst and possibly more than her due to Emily Davison , who threw herself under the king's horse on Derby Day. The book comes close enough to the present day to mention the very early career of Germaine Greer .

Her mother, born (Mary) Elizabeth Gervais, an archdeacon's daughter, died early, leaving Melesina to be brought up by others, who included a harsh governess and two aged grandfathers in succession.

Mary acquired various country skills, like milking (by hand), butter-making, and of course riding. She was not expected, however, to need to acquire skills that were marketable. Initially she was educated by about 16 governesses. They were foreign governesses, no doubt with an eye to teaching the children languages. Mary learned French, Italian, and German, but remained all her life incompetent in mathematics, counting only on her fingers. She later called her early self a formidably obstructive child, though she read a large range of fiction from Sir Walter Scott via Charlotte Yonge to Robert Louis Stevenson 's Treasure Island. The family's expenditure on education was all for the only son.

This novel alternates its moments of sensational action with long passages evoking with humour, precision, and pathos the ordinary in family life in several strata of the middle classes: nouveaux riches, newly poor, and just risen from the working class. It begins with the insufferably condescending New Year hospitality extended by Mrs Lockwood (wife of a prosperous lawyer, mother of three spoiled girls) to Mrs Hunter (poverty-stricken widow of an architect, mother of three orphan children: Molly, Martin, and Thea). Mrs Lockwood bestows one article of fashionable clothing, and quantities of party food which would have had to be thrown out if it had not been given to the Hunters. It is the story's eventual protagonist, Thea, who is most strongly drawn by the luxury of the Lockwood house, and most enraged by the crassness of Mrs Lockwood and by her own mother's humble gratitude. As time goes on, Mr Lockwood considers he is doing the Hunters a succession of favours. He looks at business papers, admonishes the struggling widow to greater economy, and later places Molly and Martin, when each leaves school at fifteen, in jobs they hate (as a governess and bank clerk respectively) and which sap their health and spirits. Unknown to any of them, Mr Lockwood has also swindled them. The deceased Richard Hunter had borrowed three hundred pounds from him and paid it back. Lockwood concealed the repayment, and accepted from the grieving widow the freehold of a paddock between the two families' properties, which he particularly wanted and whose actual cash value (probably far more than three hundred pounds) Mrs Hunter never wondered about.

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.

NCB received an elite education which combined private lessons with formal institutions. Over the years, she and her sister had French- and German-speaking governesses. Natalie soon became fluent in French, and kept a French diary.

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.

Caroline and her siblings were beaten and neglected by a series of vicious nannies and governesses. The one who starved them and caused them to go out begging for food was named Miss Alley. Caroline did a lot of riding and falling off horses.

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.

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