The Victorian Governess

THE GOVERNESS IS A FAMILIAR FIGURE TO THE READER OF VICTORIAN NOVELS. Immortalized in Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair, she has made frequent appearances as the heroine of many lesser-known novels. And innumerable governesses appear as little more than a standard furnishing in many a fictional Victorian home. While twentieth-century acquaintance with the governess may come purely from the novel, the Victorians themselves found her situation and prospects widely discussed, frivolously in Punch, and more seriously in many leading journals of the time, so often in fact that one author on the subject of female labor in Great Britain suggested that readers were “wearied … with the incessant repetition of the dreary story of spirit-broken governesses.” ¹ The governess’s life is described in what seem today to be over-dramatized accounts of pauperized gentle-women, “drifted waifs and strays from ‘the upper and middle classes,’” who find their way to the workhouse and insane asylum. ² And there are condemnations of these accounts as “comic pathos” and “a perfectly preposterous quantity of nonsense.” ³ Books on the subject of women as workers, published in growing numbers throughout the Victorian period, devote a large amount of space to the governess.