ABSTRACT
Some two years before the Governesses’ Benevolent Institution was established Emily Shirreff and Maria Grey published their first book. This was not an educational treatise but a novel with the intriguing title Passion and Principle. Originally published anonymously, it was reissued a few years later under their own names in a revised and abbreviated edition. Surprisingly, in women of such impeccable dignity, the Passion is no misnomer, but the sisters did find it necessary to kill off the beautiful secondary heroine who had tarnished her reputation by paying an innocent visit to a man in his rooms. The novel, like so many of its kind, rests on a series of misunderstandings, with the real heroine winning the hero’s love in the end. It is instructive to compare the sisters’ half-fledged ideas on education in 1841 with those they evolved during the next few years. The motherless heroine had been educated by her father, who, ‘with a woman’s tenderness watched over and trained that young and tender mind. He gave, with a father’s wisdom, the guidance and instruction needed by his child, and fostered, with a mother’s brooding love, each good and noble quality of her soul. . .. When [she] reached the age when girls generally go out, her father took her abroad.’ Such a training was no preparation for a career but, left destitute on her father’s death, the girl managed to support herself (it must have been easier then than it is now) by selling her own paintings and contributing articles to ‘a review of high literary character’.
