Governess: The Lives and Times of the Real Jane Eyres »

Ruth Brandon is the author of ten nonfiction books, including Singer and the Sewing Machine and The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini. She lives in London.

The rise and fall of the English governess, the domestic heroine who inspired Victorian literature’s greatest authors.

Between the 1780s and the end of the nineteenth century, an army of sad women took up residence in other people’s homes, part and yet not part of the family, not servants, yet not equals. To become a governess, observed Jane Austen in Emma, was to “retire from all the pleasures of life, of rational intercourse, equal society, peace and hope, to penance and mortification for ever.” However, in an ironic paradox, the governess, so marginal to her society, was central to its fiction—partly because governessing was the fate of some exceptionally talented women who later wrote novels based on their experiences. But personal experience was only one source, and writers like Wilkie Collins, William Makepeace Thackeray, Henry James, and Jane Austen all recognized that the governess’s solitary figure, adrift in the world, offered more novelistic scope than did the constrained and respectable wife. Ruth Brandon weaves literary and social history with details from the lives of actual governesses, drawn from their letters and journals, to craft a rare portrait of real women whose lives were in stark contrast to the romantic tales of their fictional counterparts. Governess will resonate with the many fans of Jane Austen and the Brontës, whose novels continue to inspire films and books, as well as fans of The Nanny Diaries and other books that explore the longstanding tension between mothers and the women they hire to raise their children.

Publishers Weekly

Before publishing her feminist manifesto, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft spent less than a year as a governess for an aristocratic Irish family, where she socialized with her employers, entranced her pupils and bewitched and unsettled her mistress. Her less gifted sisters spent much of their miserable adult lives as governesses in a variety of positions at the mercy of an uncertain market. Freethinker Claire Clairmont endured a hideous breakup with her lover, Lord Byron, and the death of their toddler daughter before spending 20 financially precarious but not altogether unpleasant years as a governess. Brandon offers plenty of absorbing nuggets about the travails of governesses, particularly among the insecure English middle classes who sought to imitate aristocratic lifestyles. But as Brandon (The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini ) acknowledges, her subjects (who also include, among others, Anna Leonowens, who inspired The King and I ) are exceptional rather than representative of the average 19th-century unmarried woman compelled to spend a lifetime in service. And much in these well-written biographical sketches is far outside the boundaries of the women's experiences as governesses. Illus. (May)

List of Illustrations

1 'There is nobody in the house with whom I can be on equal terms' 1

2 'In these days, there do not exist such people as Miss Porter' 25

3 Mary and her sisters: the problem of girls' education 41

4 Claire Clairmont: after the fall 93

5 Nelly Weeton: the cruelty of men 148

6 Anna and the King: the unbreakable bonds of class 185

7 Anna Jameson: the pursuit of independence 208

8 The Reform Firm: what do women want? 232

Notes 258

Select Bibliography 277

Index 286