To help support her family, CC found work teaching English and music. She also travelled across Switzerland and France as an accompanist and costume model. A few years later she spent some time in Ireland working as a governess.

Mary Curtis, the narrator of this story about a young girl overtaken by a tragic fate which seems inherited from the past, is careful to specify that the story is not about herself, for [i]f I had ever looked behind the veil I do not think I should publish what I saw. Instead, she is writing an outside story for my own satisfaction. Mary's father, a solicitor of high reputation, becomes Alice Hilton's guardian and trustee when Alice's socially-prominent parents die and leave her an orphan. Mary and Alice share their typical Victorian childhood: they have a governess, take dancing and singing lessons, and spend their time as most young ladies did in the middle of the century. Mary's brothers, on the other hand, went, of course, to school.Hilton Grange, where the girls and Mary's parents and brothers live, is a typical Victorian estate with one exception: there is an abandoned, razed chapel in the wood beyond the house, of which no one speaks. The chapel's foundation still stands, as do various tombstones and the steps of the altar. This chapel is easily seen from the manor, and Alice becomes curious about it, as well as about a portrait of a young girl with a pearl necklace who looks much like her. It turns out that this girl, Alicia, died young after running away with her lover. In an unconscious foreshadowing of her own fate, an effect of tragic irony, Alice tells Mary, I think I should run away if Mr Curtis stopped me from marrying the man I loved. Alice then starts dreaming about Alicia: she believes Alicia and her lover met at the chapel. Compelled by some urge beyond her own powers, Alice starts visiting the chapel on her own, and on one occasion Alicia comes to her in a red cloak, much like Alice's own red cloak. This experience marks the confluence of Alice and Alicia, for as Alice exclaims, I don't know if she was outside me or inside me. She was me!Eventually, Alice falls in love with Frank Ashford, a mere pupil at the Rectory; they meet at the chapel, just as Alice believes Alicia and her lover once did. Of course, Mary's parents forbid the liaison between them: Frank is sent away and the Curtises decide to move the girls. Alice goes to the chapel one last time and, while reaching for daffodils for remembrance, falls into the lake and drowns.

JC wrote to Samuel Richardson to explain why he ought not to make a change he wished to in Sarah Fielding 's The Governess.

After moving into the home of Weekly Dispatch editor James Harmer , she became involved in a scandal (large enough to have been known to Elizabeth Barrett Browning , who wrote of it to Mary Russell Mitford , and understood EC 's ostensible position in the home to be that of a governess), which may have been due to an attachment to Harmer's granddaughter.

He later assumed his mother's birth-name, becoming Warre Cornish. He was older than his wife by seventeen years, and had fallen love with her when she was only sixteen.They had eight children together: in the early years of her marriage she bore a child every year. She would read to her children in the evenings and sit with them while they went to sleep if they were frightened, but mostly the nurse, nursery maid, and governess took care of them. Francis Warre Cornish became Vice-Provost and Librarian of Eton College in 1893 and held those positions for almost the rest of his life. He published two novels, a volume of short stories, a history of the Victorian Church of England , and a study of Jane Austen .

Although her step-brother Bernard went to Eton , Frances Cornford received her education at home, and sometimes shared classes with her nearby cousins, one of whom was Gwen Darwin , later Raverat. Frances's governess, Ada Sharpley , tutored her in French and Latin while an aunt of Graham Greene instructed her in drawing. She was introduced to poetry by her mother at an early age.

She may have worked as a governess at various points in her life, and taught or assisted at Lewisham Hill Grammar School.

Another of VC 's novels wherein the female protagonist experiments with marital relations, this one has a happier ending. Lydia leaves a life as a nursery governess in Britain to marry an Arizona rancher, and the two eventually have a child. She then leaves her husband and child to be with the wealthy Eustace Pelham, a British traveller who comes to the ranch, and although she almost leaves him when he treats her unkindly, by the novel's end the couple come to the understanding that they can live together more or less happily.

HC became intimate friends with a young German servant, Clara, who came to work at the Hendersons.HC notes in her diary that she acted like a sister towards Clara, who insisted on sleeping with her, and calling her Hannah dear.

ED began writing as a child. She and her brother William (two years older) each produced a newspaper: hers was the Herald. It carried news, reviews, letters (often on theological topics), and parliamentary reporting. An advertisement in it for a governess specified that this person would have to teach a self-willed female pupil with an over-developed organ of self-esteem.

In her use of the diary form with prosaic narrator, EMD was probably influenced by George and Weedon Grossmith 's The Diary of a Nobody (1892). The autobiographical fiction, set in a small Devon village, provides an amusing, lightly satirical account of the social mores of smart and would-be smart middle-class country society from a distinctly female point of view. The Provincial Lady, a wife and mother of two, writes about her everyday life, including her constant struggles with unpaid bills, the servant question, her Women's Institute work, and her Book-of-the-Month Club reading. The servants, particularly Cook and Mademoiselle (the French governess), clearly wield the power in the household. The impassive husband spends his days behind a newspaper, letting out the occasional grunt. The diary ends with his assessment of her writing: he tells her kindly, but quite definitely, . . . That is Waste of Time.

As an unusually talented woman moving in fashionable and high-culture circles, the future MD knew almost everybody of interest during her lifetime, including literary celebrities. She was a good friend of the Bluestocking group, and more particularly of Ann Donellan and of Margaret, Duchess of Portland , who was highly cultivated, sociable, and rich. She was instrumental in the duchess's offer of a job (as governess) and a home for life to the scholar Elizabeth Elstob in December 1738.

EMD 's sister, Irene Elizabeth or Ella , was devoted to Ethel, and was both possessive and protective about her. She became governess in 1903 to the young Maurice Bowra and his brother; their father later invited her to come out to Peking, where the Bowra family was then living, to coach the boys for English public schools, but Vincent Dell adamantly refused to let her go, invoking the word duty.

Action takes over after the three Steeles leave London to stay with an uncle's family in the country. The governess there, Beatrice West, is a puzzle to Maggie. She is possessed of brains, tact, a good education, and great power of making herself agreeable, yet Maggie has a vague idea of something concealed and not above-board about her. In the end, after an apparent poaching incident, the poacher returns to try to steal money out of a drawer. When Maggie's mother surprises him he menaces her with a blunt instrument; Maggie intervenes to protect her mother and sustains injuries from the burglar which prove in the long run mortal. Beatrice West, who has fled the house, sends a letter to confess her confederacy with the burglar, Baxter, who forced her to it by threatening to blackmail and expose her. Her cool, audaciously frank epistle confesses that she is a mere adventurer . . . and don't pretend to be anything else. Her father was a sort of superior swell mobsman, who worked with lower-class accomplices and occasionally required help from his daughter. After his death, something that she insists was a whim, or some hitherto hankering after novelty, made her decide to take a respectable job; she set her sights, in fact, on marrying her employer, a widower, and still feels that they could, without anything approaching romance, have made one another happy. When Baxter catches up with her she longs to make a clean breast of her situation: but she uses the word Prejudice for that wish to be honest which fights a losing battle with Reason, which tells her she must unwillingly co-operate with crime against those who have been kind to her.

ID was educated at home by tutors and by her maternal grandmother, Mary Westenholz . Her aunt Mary Bess Westenholz , a campaigner for women's rights, was also heavily involved in ID 's upbringing. Her mother taught her English and French, chastity and selflessness, and their governess, Maria Zøylner , mostly taught her writing. She later wrote to her brother that the system allowed practically all my abilities to lie fallow and passed me on to charity or prostitution in some shape or other.

EHD described her mother, Marian (MacMahon) Hepworth Dixon as a woman with innate good taste and good manners; she would be just as amiable to a governess as to a duchess. Her mother held progressive views: she attended all Ibsen 's plays (by herself) when they were first produced (and were widely seen as shocking) and was almost, the first woman in London to employ a woman doctor in childbirth (which she did for her youngest child). She was something of a suffragist, for Ella writes that she presented me, on my return from school-days in Germany, with a petition to sign for women's suffrage.

Its orphan heroine works as a governess and is courted by two older men. At seventeen she is tricked into a disastrous marriage with a Calvinist minister of fifty-two, and in the end she dutifully dies.GD is already in this first publication using her work as a vehicle for her opinions—which include contempt for what she calls the Woman's Rights mania. Her dislike of the restrictiveness of provincial Scottish society is strongly coloured by a dislike of the national Presbyterian religion.

The poem's narrative enforces its moral. Mary, an orphan who later has to work as a governess, is prepared to sacrifice her lover, Pembroke, an earl's son, to her privileged cousin Lady Jane, who returns her friendship. The plot, however, provides a lover for Jane too: Elliot, a young chaplain. Each girl therefore marries out of her immediate class (one up and one down) which lends an unusual touch to the happy ending. Each falls in love after rescue: Pembroke saves Mary from drowning; Elliot revives Lady Jane when she faints. The villain of the story is Jane's mother, the Countess, who was Mary's mother's unsuccessful rival for the love of Mary's father. Ballads are interpolated in the narrative poem. A side episode relates (as a poem written by Elliot) the story of a young wife, Julia, stolen away, a story confided to a black ex-servant named, ironically, Eugenius [meaning well-bred], who turns out to be Julia in disguise. The combination of cross-dressing and racial disguise suggests that of Sarah Green 's Gretna Green Marriages, 1823 (where the white-woman-disguised-as-black-male is named Pembroke).

The following year she resumed her education at home under the guidance of a Swiss tutor and a French governess.

Georgina later travelled to Australia with Eliza and worked as a governess. She left sketches of her new country which are now in the Mitchell Library in Sydney, and she died at the family home one year before her mother.

When she was reduced to looking for work as a governess she found it a disadvantage to be not a member of the Church of England.

Having abandoned her plan for running a girls' boarding school, EE took up her post as governess to the Duchess of Portland 's very young children.

On leaving school at sixteen, Peggy Whistler (later ME ) went abroad to teach English, apparently some maths, and drawing at a school in Touraine in France: Cours Saint-Denis in Loches. She disliked this school, where both the discipline and the physical conditions were spartan. She also worked for a time as a governess for a Syrian family living at Alton in Hampshire. Her pupil there, a six-year-old boy, later remembered her reading to him from Tennyson 's The Lady of Shalott.

Mirror Talk asks: Is that my mother now behind the glass, looking / dark-eyed and weary, as if doubting / whether I can be trusted to count pills . . . . But not all the new poems relate directly to the collection's title. Writing to Jane Eyre (a response to Portuguese artist Paula Rego 's illustrations to Charlotte Brontë 's novel) treats the marriage ending sardonically: the lowly governess's marriage will leave you free to embrace true servitude, Marry him, Jane! You will wear cerulean blue.Last Muse characterizes this semi-divine personage as [a] bossy ghost I work for.