Governess: The Lives and Times of the Real Jane Eyres - Hardcover

Brandon, Ruth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080271630X ISBN 13: 9780802716309

Publisher: Walker Books, 2008

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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.

Reviews

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)
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In nineteenth-century England, girls were most commonly educated by governesses; the system was also a way of absorbing the country’s "huge pool of spinsters." (The 1851 census found that thirty per cent of women above the age of twenty were single.) For upper- and middle-class women forced to earn a living, it represented one of the only respectable employments, and often a dreaded inevitability: after succumbing to the profession, in 1820, Claire Clairmont, the cosmopolitan stepsister of Mary Shelley and the mother of Byron’s child, wrote in her journal, "Think of thyself as a stranger and traveller on the earth, to whom none of the many affairs of this world belong." This exploration of the lives of six governesses is as entertaining as the contemporary works of fiction such lives inspired ("Jane Eyre" chief among them), and although the bulk of the primary source material is not new, Brandon displays a keen understanding of a complex educational system that kept its subjects ignorant even while purporting to enlighten.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Walker Books
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 080271630X
• ISBN 13: 9780802716309
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320