In financial straits, the sixty-five-year-old MAB wrote of looking for work as a housekeeper or governess, though she feared she might be unemployable.

After a stint as a governess, AB decided she could afford the rental of a house in Colby Road, Upper Norwood, for herself, Mabel , and a maid.

Her next job, as tutor or nursery-governess in a private family in Surbiton, developed spontaneously into the running of a small private school for a dozen children in the house of the original pupil's family. EB taught all the subjects studied, put on children's plays, and served food at a dinner-party when the parlourmaid fell ill. She also, at this period, began publishing illustrated books for small children.

After she finished her education in France, CMB returned to England and found work as a governess. At first, she worked at schools in Dover and Brighton. Later she worked in a private home for a family in Leicestershire. It was at this time that she began contributing short stories to The Lamp, a Catholic penny magazine. A parcel of books was her only payment for this early literary work.

She performed in Liverpool as well as York. Wilkinson wrote unflatteringly of her in his memoirs, as did William Beloe. John Nichols thought well of her talents, though he called her wayward and eccentric, in his Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century.David Erskine Baker in the 1812 edition of Biographia Dramatica said she performed with force and discrimination. After leaving the stage she went to work as a governess.

AB remained silent about her brief foray into paid work, as a governess. At Bolton Le Moors she began keeping house for her brother Walter. She worked as a conservationist to preserve various monuments, and as a tireless committee woman on behalf of the YWCA and of Coventry Cathedral. In 1914 she was elected to the committee of Coventry's Natural History and Scientific Society . Walter became a Vice-President of the society at this time, and later she became its first woman Vice-President. This led in turn to her becoming a founder member of the Coventry City Guild . The guild concerned itself with the preservation of history: AB (a great collector of objects) donated to its museum a pair of gloves worn by George Eliot . During the First World War it managed a scheme for growing vegetables in allotments, while AB herself worked in a creche for the children of munitions workers. In 1924, at her urging, the guild established an annual Education Week.

AB , who had previously worked as a governess in private families, planned when she received her first tiny grant from the Royal Literary Fund to open a small school, but it is not clear whether she ever did this.

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.

When she was old enough, Mary took over some of the instruction of the younger pupils at her father's school. From 1827 she worked as a governess and from 1829 as a teacher in a girls' school run by her mother and sisters.

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.

On returning from France, Mary Novello (later MCC ) took up her intended profession in the position of governess for the Purcell family. She was responsible for five children, the eldest only two years younger than herself. She scored a great hit with her charges for the plays she composed and performed in their dolls' theatre, but (being used to such high standards) she always worried that her piano teaching and playing might not be good enough. Her salary was twenty pounds a year, and when she received a five-pound note for her first quarter's pay she slept all night with it under her pillow, before receiving special permission for a day off in which to take her earnings home to her mother.

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.

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.

In Paris, the young LSC supplemented her mother's pension by painting miniatures and working as a governess.

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

She worked a number of jobs that included teaching (she was a governess who attended her pupils by the day and did not live in), jewelry-making, and needlework. In the 1840s she was making about sixty pounds a year by her teaching. Driven by financial need, she also began writing, mainly for periodicals that would pay her for contributions. In 1842 she began work as an assistant editor for Friendship's Offering; this was the first of several editorial positions. Working after her marriage for The Keepsake, she was almost solely responsible for corresponding with authors such as Thackeray , Anna Maria Hall , Tennyson , and theBrownings , and for correcting proofs of their work.

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.

SF declined an invitation to work as a governess to the young daughter of Anne Dewes (sister of Mary Delany ).

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 ).

In July 1797 Isaac Taylor the elder responded to the harsh economic climate (caused in turn by the war with France) by beginning to employ his children in his engraving business instead of apprentices. He paid them wages (which was not the practice in many family businesses). AGT's later comment suggests how far this was out of step with usual gender roles. She said he thought he was fitting us for self-support in after life, not otherwise than feminine. The implication is that others, then or later, saw their work as unfeminine. From 1797 she and Jane alternated a week of engraving with a week of housekeeping. During their non-engraving weeks they each in turn saw to the cooking, washing, and getting up the fine linens. Ann later turned down a job as a governess; but well-meaning people were always advising the sisters to teach instead of engraving.

AMH was instrumental in founding the Hospital for Consumption at Brompton. She also helped to found the Governesses' Benevolent Institution Asylum , the Home for Decayed Gentlewoman , and the Nightingale Fund .