The Governess

Her trap was her education. A middle-class girl was raised to be a 'lady' — accomplished in music, French, and drawing — but if her family lost its money, she had exactly one respectable way to earn a living: teaching other people's children. The factory and the shop were deemed too lowly for a gentlewoman. So she moved into a stranger's house to raise their daughters, and discovered she belonged nowhere in it: not family, not servant, she ate apart and sat apart, a lady on wages.

The wages were miserable because the supply of desperate gentlewomen was endless. A resident governess might earn £20 a year — Charlotte Brontë's salary, with £4 deducted for her washing — while £35 to £80 was more usual even in wealthy houses; an 1843 Punch advertisement demanded French, music, singing, dancing, and drawing for £2 a month. The Governesses' Benevolent Institution, founded in 1843, offered annuities to the aged and a registry for the jobless, and Queen's College, London, opened in 1848 to give governesses real qualifications.

Artists and novelists made her the age's great symbol of the woman alone. Richard Redgrave's The Governess of 1844 shows her sunk in shadow with a black-edged letter while her charges play in sunlight — Redgrave's own sister Jane had been a governess and died young. Rebecca Solomon's The Governess of 1851 studies the same isolation, and Jane Eyre (1847) turned the figure into literature's most famous heroine. The schoolroom she ruled was small, but it taught England that educated women could work — and be ladies still.