The English heroine, Marian Best, a governess, is working also as a spy (she needs the money to support her crippled younger brother). As an employee in the governor's family of a Russian-held city she wins all hearts, and returns the love of Captain Zassoulic. She also possesses herself of military secrets. She is unmasked with Zassoulic's active participation, but they are permitted to marry so that, as a new-made patriotic Russian, she will not communicate her potentially damaging knowledge.

Once Ryan and Bosanquet were running their orphanage together, they were joined in the project by Crosby and Ann Tripp , a pious young woman (born in 1745) who became governess to the children. She stayed with the community on its move to Yorkshire, and later became, with Sarah Crosby , a leader of Methodism at Leeds. One of the children in her care was the four-year-old Sally Lawrence (niece of Ryan), whose mother had just died.

Joan Rosita Torr received the grounding of her classical education from a governess before she went to school. She said she recollected little of her childhood except an extraordinary number of accidents involving ponies or horses. She had few pleasures except riding and fox-hunting, but she read voraciously.

The title-page quotes And each man kills the thing he loves . . . , from Wilde 's recent The Ballad of Reading Gaol. The title comes from a phrase applied by a snobbish minor character to those she regards as underbred people with money infiltrating fashionable society. The apparent heroine of the early pages, Aline Hayward (a slip in continuity gives her full name first as Aline Victoria Ernestine Hayward, then as Aline Alexandra Victoria Hayward), is born into a dysfunctional upper-class family. Her father, the politically ambitious Stephen Hayward , is obsessed with expunging the disgrace brought on his ancient family by his father's debts, financial crime, and prison sentence. Her unloved nonentity of a mother dies at her birth. Is the boy all right? the newly bereaved Stephen asks his devoted sister, Constantia, and when he hears the baby's sex he exclaims, Good heavens! How like Angela to have a girl. He leaves his family at once to return to politics, in which his career is marked by changing sides from Liberal to Conservative. Aline grows up in seclusion and emotional deprivation, never seeing her father, learning nothing under the regime of a rigidly fact-crunching German governess. At sixteen she secretly marries a well-known jockey, who poses as the rightful heir to her family's estate. Having supposed she was romantically righting an ancient wrong, she is horrified at the reality of a brutal marriage. Her father borrows money and buys her out of it (his love belatedly awakened by her plight) before her husband is in any case killed in an accident. Aline's father is left with a new tie to the man he has borrowed from: Karl Althaus, a self-made South African millionaire and rough diamond, whom her aunt Constance snobbishly loathes.

Following the successful completion of her studies, Constance Black (later CG ) was appointed as a lecturer in classical studies at Newnham College . However, it was only a single-term appointment and she soon began to look for work elsewhere. In 1884 she took a position as a governess, for which she was paid £100 per annum. While she taught the daughters of the family, the sons went to school. By September 1887 CG was appointed by Walter Besant as a librarian at the recently-opened People's Palace in East London (the ancestor of the present Queen Mary and Westfield College ).

MW held several governess posts, one of which she describes to her sister as a noisom irksom Den.

The childhood of the heroine, Rosa, occupies the opening of the second volume, after the odds have been stacked against her during the first. The story opens with the total ruin by gambling of her dissipated father, Hervey Melmoth. He made a clandestine marriage as a recent undergraduate about to embark on the Grand Tour, on which he took up with the treacherous Margaretta Neville as his mistress. She (the illegitimate daughter of a society woman who wanted to dispose of her as a nun) was the accomplice of a Venetian con-man when they met. Rosa, rejected by her grandfather and brought up by a mourning widow, resolves against ever marrying. She falls in love with Rainsford Sinclair, navigates among predatory young men and warning tales of seduction, and fears lest Sinclair may inherit the falsehood of his sex. She becomes a governess, has her parentage suspected, and writes a passage of couplets against the double standard of sexual behaviour. She is at a low ebb, a dread hour of agony and despair (with the unprincipled O'Carrol pretending that she is married to him), when she meets her long-lost father, who at once fights a pistol duel (one of many in the novel) with O'Carrol and hideously disfigures him. O'Carrol's fate is presented as poetic justice, as is the end of Margaretta, who also returns to the story, now married but still a fury. She falls, drunk, off a ferry in the Irish Channel: with all her sins upon her head, into eternity! a striking example of the fatal effects of giving way to our passions. Rosa achieves happy marriage.

AWE was educated at home, with a nurse, governess, and tutors in French, the piano, and drawing. As a young girl she also vowed to read every book in her parents' large library, but as she recalls in her memoir, as I have so often done, I hedged and substituted Take down and read in for read.

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.

MW was initially educated at home. Her literary and artistic father, an Oxford MA in Classics, fostered in her a keen awareness of the natural world.He possessed a library in which Mary spent much of her childhood absorbed in books. She had a governess, too, who taught her literature, history, and painting: E. M. Lory , known as Minoni, came to the family when Mary was ten, and remained a lifelong friend.

HSW 's family encouraged her in the regular pursuits of a young, middle-class Victorian woman. From her father she inherited an enthusiasm for poetry—she especially liked Shakespeare , Coleridge , and Whitman —and she read Scott , Austen , Dickens , and other novelists whose works were deemed to have met the high moral standards of her family. The family governess, Marion Birdie Spooner , was adept in languages and music, but the aspect of her teaching that most appealed to Harriet was her interest in history and current affairs; it was from her that Harriet first learned some acquaintance with Liberal politics. She became fond of essayists who advocated individualism and equality, such as Mill and Emerson . In addition to reading, HSW studied drawing and French. Her parents, however, were unsympathetic to her desire to go to university.

JW found herself a governess position after her father's death. On 24 January 1750 John Mulso reported that she had a new post with a Lady Sherrard at Hampton Court, where he looked forward to visiting her. During her illness at the end of this year, Hester Mulso was already looking for a new position for her, and in less than a year she took up a job with the family of Dr Sneyd . Then in1753 she went to work for the family of William Thoyts . The two little Thoyt girls, born in 1747 and 1749, in due course became the Two Young Married Ladies to whom JW addressed her conduct book.

STW was privately and exceptionally well educated. Her mother conducted lessons for two hours every morning, teaching her how to read by using the Bible. Her father gave her the run of his library, and taught her history informally. Sylvia, however, resented the lack of attention that she, a girl, received from her father in comparison with the Harrow boys he taught. She also had a French governess. She later regarded it as an advantage not to have been at school: I wasn't educated, I was very lucky.

The title character, Eliza de Crui, sets the tone for discussion by writing from Brussels to Mrs Pierpont at Liège with the remark that, since it is so hard to say anything new, she will sometimes draw on her commonplace-book: this, she says, does not make her a plagiarist. Letters are passed around for reading by a whole circle, in something of the manner of Richardson 's Sir Charles Grandison. The problems faced by single or unhappily married women are bleakly painted, a fairly conservative line is taken on the subject of the re-admittance to society of a penitent fallen woman, and a titled lady employed as a governess is reported as wisely consider[ing] home as the female theatre for action. But LMW sets a high value on women's sensibility, learning, and courage. Her footnotes provide a running commentary on notable women of history, including those on the fringes of (and often destroyed by) power, like Lady Jane Grey and Mary Queen of Scots , and writers like Margaret Cavendish and Elizabeth Carter . LMW believes that Dorothy, Lady Pakington (whom she calls Lady Pilkington) is known to have been the real author of the Whole Duty of Man, and of several other moral and divine treatises.

The letters are those of two sisters in their teens: Constance, who is away from home for the summer, and Felicia. Both are serious students of botany, and of the Linnean taxonomy, and Felicia has the help of the family governess.

A German woman, Louise Lehzen , was hired as governess to Princess Alexandrina Victoria .

The narrative is set in the countryside surrounding the fictitious town of Wichborough, where Vera's father is the Dean. Vera is raised with a surprising degree of leniency: the athletic and fearless child rides the countryside unchaperoned. Her behaviour is met with alarm, and her proper governess decares to her mother: if she grows up as she is, I do not see how you are ever to take her into society. . . . this riding about by herself should be stopped. It encourages these wild gipsy habits. Vera consistently defends her wild behaviour, however, and the narrative arc emphasizes the strength of character (and essential morality) that result from her defiance of social norms.

Elizabeth Tyrwhit and her husband were given custody for a few months of Princess, later Queen, Elizabeth , replacing her governess Katherine Astley —who, however, was then reinstated.

ST wrote later that she never had any proper education, only a very odd and patchy series of experiments. She and her sister had a governess with absolutely no talent for teaching, so apart from a brief period when they did lessons with two other girls, they made no effort and learned very little—a state of affairs for which she later blamed her parents.

Because UT 's parents disapproved of girls' schools, she was educated at home. Her first governess taught her to draw; her second, a Belgian, bored her.

Their second daughter, Sarah known as Selina , taught the younger ones and also some neighbour children. She later worked for as governess in the household of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire , and later still became the subject of an essay by Virginia Woolf .

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.

As a child, KCT was educated privately at home by a governess, a fact she attributes to being an only child.

Though sad to see her friend emigrate, Charlotte Brontë understood Mary's motivation: Mary has made up her mind that she can not and will not be a governess, a teacher, a milliner, a bonnetmaker nor housemaid. She sees no means of obtaining employment she would like in England, so she is leaving it. During her first years in the colony Mary supported herself by teaching the piano and by renting the house she had built; by 1850 she had raised enough capital to go into business, which was the type of occupation she desired.