Anna Murphy (later ABJ ) was employed as a governess to the Marquess of Winchester's four sons.

At her father's death it became necessary for FAK and her unmarried sisters to find work, and they all became governesses. Her first job was at Bradford in Yorkshire, in the family of an industrialist where she was not ultimately a success.FAK not only modelled the governess-heroine of Anne Sherwood, 1857, on an idealised version of herself, but specifically says in that novel that she has experienced the privations typical of the governess's life. One family of children she looked after were grandchildren of the poet Shelley by Harriet (the young wife who preceded Mary Godwin Shelley , and later killed herself) but FAK fell out with the mother of this family.

OS went to be a governess at Barkly East, thirty miles north-east of Cradock; she was too upset by family disruptions to fulfil her duties, and left after several weeks.

AB left home for a short period as a governess at Blake Hall, near Mirfield.

CB took a temporary position as a governess not far from Haworth.

When the Morning Chronicle announced on January 30 her appointment as a sub-governess, ECK insisted on having the claim contradicted, as she was not a sub-governess but a lady companion to the Princess. This insistence on her status surfaced again in a letter written to the Prince Regent in April, in which she complained of her treatment since arriving at Windsor, specifically the Queen's reference to her as a sub-governess.

After two years in ManchesterML took a job as a milliner with Briggs and Co. at Newcastle in Staffordshire. She stayed there, living in lodgings, for three years, till she was twenty-three. She then moved from Newcastle to Hawksworth in Nottinghamshire, where she worked as a schoolteacher at the National School run by the local clergyman, the Rev. William Walton Herringham . The only other teacher covered French and music; Mary undertook everything else, and particularly enjoyed teaching drawing. She lost the job, however, when an epidemic of scarlet fever sent most of the boys home and Mr Herringham could no longer afford her wages. Her most recent biographer, Cordelia Stamp, does not support the story that she was a governess in the family of the Rev. Robert Miles , rector of Bingham near Hawksworth, but mentions as her first governess job her post with another clergyman, named Hope, at Derby. Here ML virtually filled the position of mother to six children whose actual mother was an invalid (or, according to Stamp, a hypochondriac). She stayed there till early 1869. This position gave her the opportunity of playing the organ at church on Sundays, and developing her aptitude for flower-painting, in both oil and watercolours. Cordelia Stamp reproduces an oil portrait by her.

Her father's bankruptcy meant that Sydney had to work as a governess, though he was never comfortable about her doing this.

Frances Eleanor Ternan (later FET ) worked as companion governess to Thomas Adolphus Trollope 's twelve-year-old daughter, Beatrice Trollope (Bice), after the latter's mother died.

After this school closed because of her ill health and her mother's opium problem, she worked for nearly thirty years more as schoolteacher and as governess.

FH , in Paris, was briefly engaged by Lady Mountcashel as her daughters' governess, at a salary of sixty pounds a year. But she was dismissed within three weeks for reasons that remain disputable.

By mid-1734, EJ , in debt because of her divorced husband 's failure to pay her maintenance, took a job as governess to the three daughters of Hill Evans , a British merchant who lived and traded in St Petersburg. She negotiated her salary up from fourteen to twenty pounds a year, and she represents herself as having been a great success as a governess. Among the texts she used with the children were hymns for morning and evening by Bishop Thomas Ken .

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

Winifred Nithsdale did, however, eventually follow in the footsteps of her mother in serving as a royal governess in the exiled Stuart family: in her case to Henry Benedict Stuart (Charles Edward's younger brother, who became eventually a Roman Catholic cardinal). She filled this role in practice from the time when he was a baby, but it was not until 4 July 1727, when James III was planning to leave for Spain for a possible invasion of Britain after the death of George I, that a pompous document officially inaugurated Our Right Trusty and Right well beloved Winifred Countess of Nithsdale into the place and quality of governess to our dearly beloved son Henry Duke of York. The appointment lasted only until the little boy was four, when he was reckoned of an age to have male teachers. Winifred Nithsdale remained with Clementina Sobieska until the latter's early death in 1735.

CR again took a temporary post for two months as governess; her health once more suffered, and this was the last such position that she held.

From the time (during her teens) when the family's governess left them, Elizabeth became a sort of governess to her younger sisters. She was skilled at making her own gowns, caps, and other articles of clothing.

Facing poverty and wishing to improve her status, HS began to write magazine stories. She and her sister Elizabeth also qualified as a governesses. Though Hesba's teaching was limited to Sunday School, Elizabeth became by 1867 a well-paid governess with an annual wage of £70.

HW gives a hair-raising account of her first interview for a school-teaching job (which she turned down). At past thirty she started a school with her sister in London. By 1798 she had given it up and was seeking a job as a family governess. She was indignant that a governess should be expected to eat at the steward's table, and noted that a male tutor would be treated with more respect. A decade later she did some research in Yorkshire for a suitable building in which to start a Protestant nunnery.

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.