After various primary schools both in Brussels and London, CBR and her sister were for a time taught by an English governess.

EBB was taught at home by her mother , who closely supervised her education, and by various tutors and a French governess. She was an early and voracious reader, and began writing letters when she was four years old, a practice her mother fostered even when they were in the same house. EBB received instruction in French, mathematics, and the classical languages and literatures, subjects that formed the basis of an advanced education and that were not usually taught to girls in her time. When she was about twelve, she studied Greek, Latin, French, and probably also Italian under the tutor employed to prepare her brother Edward for entry into Charterhouse school in London. She also learned a little Hebrew, which she used to work her way through the Hebrew Bible.

Whereas Laura succeeded in learning self-control, Ellen Percy (MB 's second heroine, an heiress) has to learn from the discipline harshly inflicted on her by life (that is, the book maintains, by the hand of God). When once she discovers that her worthy suitor Henry Maitland sincerely cares about her, she responds not like a willing potential bride but like a capricious flirt. I should as soon have dreamt of marrying my father. She is then flattered by the charms of a fortune-hunter, Lord Frederick de Burgh, almost falling into his clutches by eloping with him, but she has a narrow and humiliating escape when he changes his mind. After her father has failed for near a million and committed suicide, she repents and begins the attempt to live like a Christian. She travels to Edinburgh, where she is reduced to near destitution, to vainly pursuing a job as a governess, and finally to a madhouse, before her eventual reunion with her original lover. MB 's narrative voice, ironical in tone, often expresses repressive attitudes towards women in general. I earnestly recommend to all ladies who see cause of offence against their rightful governors (an accident which will sometimes happen, notwithstanding the universal meekness of ladies, and the well-known moderation of gentlemen,) never to indulge in meditations upon past injury.

Another adviser was apparently the Bristol writer Charles Abraham Elton (who also employed Elizabeth Ham as a governess in his family and helped her revise her longest poem for publication). He suggested that Bryan might write Village Tales in the manner of Crabbe .

At nearly four years old, Bryher was given a copy of The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss . She persuaded her governess to read this to her often because, she later recalled, it was the essence of truth to me.

Apart from places and scenery, the work gives most space to the difficulties Bunbury encountered in securing an appropriate chaperone, and in general deciding what activities were proper to engage in as a middle-class Englishwoman. She describes setting forth accompanied by Miss Strict, an English governess who conveys young women to Paris for a Continental education. Another anecdote concerns her discovery that the friends with whom she had intended to stay had unexpectedly left the city (a near-repeat of an experience in Sweden), and that she was in need of another escort. She relates her first meeting with the best candidate available, an elderly Frenchman travelling to the Pyrenees to take the waters: In short I was presented to an old gentleman, who politely, but with a terrible grimace caused by rheumatism, raised himself on crutches, and expressed a readiness to take charge of me en route. A feeble stranger was apparently preferable to travelling with no respectable companion at all.

The fictional Misselthwaite Manor and its secret garden are set in Yorkshire, but FHB said they were modelled on her own recently-lost Maytham Hall in Kent. She added that the most important character, though she appears in person only briefly at the end of the story, is the Yorkshire earth mother Susan Sowerby, mother of Dickon and the housemaid Martha, a poor cottage woman with twelve children and no-nonsense ways of bringing them up. The female protagonist, Mary Lennox, arrives at Misselthwaite Manor as by common consent the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen . . . . She had a little thin face and a little thin body, thin light hair and a sour expression. Her upbringing in British India, entirely at the hands of Indian servants who dared not cross her, has kept her fretful as well as ugly: at six she was as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived. She gets called Mistress Mary Quite Contrary, a nursery-rhyme allusion which silently implies her future connection with a garden. No English governess will stay with her, and she owes her literacy solely to her own desire to learn (the first positive character-trait revealed in her). Another characteristic of feminist interest is that she was not a self-sacrificing person.

Youngest of the family was FB 's fellow-novelist Sarah Harriet Burney , the daughter of the second marriage, who also worked as a governess.

Opening in Lyons, the story moves through a whole list of places personally known to LCB : England (where Bertha goes to be a governess after her husband deserts her), Scotland, Switzerland, and Italy (where she reads in the Ambrosiana Library in Milan, delighting in the manuscript of Virgil which once belonged to Petrarch ). LCB uses polyglot quotations to head her chapters (English, French, Italian), and poetry probably of her own composition is interspersed in the text. Bertha is left at the end a widow, serene if not cheerful.

The Ladies and the rural ideal they embodied became famous in literary circles, an object of pilgrimage alike to the lesbian Anne Lister and to more conventional figures like William Wordsworth and the Irish poet J. S. Anna Liddiard . Lady Louisa Stuart visited in 1782, and found herself disposed to be captivated by anything so romantic.Sarah Harriet Burney visited not of her own volition but was brought (in autumn 1805) by the family in which she was then governess. Wordsworth, in a sonnet written in their grounds in 1824, To the Lady E. B. and the Hon. Miss P., mentions their local predecessors as including fierce ancient Britons and pious hermits. He concludes Sisters in love, a love allowed to climb / Ev'n on this earth, above the reach of time.

JB was educated primarily at home by a governess, her parents, and their friends and acquaintances. She studied both Italian and English literature. At some point during her life she also became fluent in French. Her mother often listened to the children reading aloud and then tested them on the subject-matter. She also encouraged them to develop their artistic talents. Josephine studied and played the piano.

Of everything that Jane Briancourt says of her MGB, the story that she worked as governess in an opulent, but dull family is the single detail that sounds least unlikely to be true of the novelist.

The reader meets Ida as an immature girl of sixteen who, with three elder brothers, wishes herself a boy. Her mother is a clergyman's widow, and she has had an unconventional, economical upbringing, largely abroad in France and Germany. She feels her brothers' lives are real, and mine all make believe. She wishes she could train as a governess, because then learning would be really worth while, and I should be as good as a boy. As things are, she struggles a little with ancient Greek (having had her ambition fired by reading George Eliot "Romola," then coming out in the Cornhill), but in fact she is purposeless and at a loss. Meanwhile her friend Mary Maxwell, only seven years older, has returned from India with her small son because he was ill there, and now faces the hard decision of leaving him with her parents to go back to India because her husband in turn is ill.

One of AC 's best known novels, Materfamilias is a gently mocking story of family relationships, told from the perspective of a devoted, but frequently self-deluding, wife and mother. The narrator, Mary, begins the novel as a wilful English girl of eighteen, who first flees her father's house when he marries her governess, and then herself elopes. Her marriage, which she describes as a horrible catastrophe, soon ends when her husband sickens and dies while in Australia. Mary arrives in Victoria too late to see him again. She soon remarries. The rest of the novel is her biased tale of their family struggles and triumphs.

In May of 1892, a selection of the letters which JWC had written during the 1840s to Amelie Bölte (a German governess whom she had befriended) were published in the New Review.Geraldine Jewsbury 's half of their correspondence appeared in 1893 as Selections from the Letters of Geraldine Endsor Jewsbury to Jane Welsh Carlyle.

DC 's mother, Charlotte (Houghton) Carrington , was born in the 1850s into a family of whom little is known, but which lived in Kent and was of a lower class than the Carringtons (DC once negatively compared her maternal grandfather's work as a sanitary inspector to her father's work as a real engineer). In a January 1919 letter to Mark Gertler , DC noted that her mother, a governess, agreed to marry Samuel Carringtonout of pity because he wanted looking after.

Exploiting the style of Charlotte Brontë 's Jane Eyre, BC published a novel entitled The Poor Governess.

In her young days EC 's father had supposed that some job at court might be found for such a prodigy. In middle age she was offered, but declined, a job as royal governess.

She spent two-and-a-half years at the London Hospital, and met her future husband, Thomas Chant , while he was a house surgeon there. When their plans for marriage became known (the Hospital forbade relationships between its male and female staff) Laura Ormiston Dibbin left and took another job. She worked as assistant matron at a lunatic asylum for a year, and then as a companion and governess to a woman and her daughters.

Suggestions were put to her about taking up a job as companion to an English duchess or governess in a German princely household, but the always-influential Elizabeth Montagu disliked the sound of the first position and HMC felt herself unable to face the upheaval represented by the second.

Unlike her sister Madge, who had attended the well-known girls' boarding school Roedean, AC received home schooling. Her father taught her arithmetic, but she was thought to be slowbecause she found spelling and writing laborious. Her sister attempted to teach her French from a book called Le Petit precepteur, but Agatha hated the book and refused to learn the language. A series of French governesses followed, but all failed. Agatha learned French only while living in Pau. The Millers there employed a young dressmaker's assistant, Marie Sijé , who did not speak English. Agatha adored Marie (who eventually returned to England with the Millers). She learned the mandolin and the piano from a German music teacher.

The plot moves rapidly through numerous homosexual and heterosexual affairs and love triangles. The first act culminates in the wedding of a lesbian governess and a homosexual explorer, an expression of the confining gender roles imposed by Victorian society. The characters' sexualities, repressed in the first act, become more overt in the second, in which characters deliberately experiment with different sexual arrangements (including a threesome with incestuous implications). As in many of Churchill's plays, the female characters represent different forms of feminism, none of which is failproof, but all of which constitute important alternatives to the status quo. Lin, a radical lesbian, struggles with conflicting ideas about femininity and raising a daughter; Victoria, an intellectual feminist, experiments with lesbianism and new-age goddess worship; Betty, a traditional wife and mother, finally learns to express sexual desire. In a striking monologue near the end of the play, Betty reveals her discovery of sexual pleasure through masturbation. Though it leaves its characters still seeking answers, Cloud Nine takes a strong stance against sexual oppression of all sorts.

As a young child, JHC was educated at home with her siblings by a governess. For French and other advanced subjects the others were accompanied by the governess to private classes, but JHC was not permitted to attend these, owing to the state of her health. She later reflected that this led to hours of solitary suffering by which her natural tendencies to reflection and morbid feeling were increased.

When Olivia was in her twenties, Sydney found her a job as a governess to two little girls in the family of General Brownrigg of Dublin.