[In the following excerpt, Hughes provides an overview of nineteenth-century fiction featuring the character of the governess, beginning with Jane Austen's 1816 novel Emma, and ending with James' 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw.]

Reader, I married him. A quiet wedding we had: he and I, the parson and clerk, were alone present.

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)

It is a curious proof of the present feeling towards governesses, that they are made the heroines of many popular novels.

Mary Maurice, Governess Life (1849)

If we think we know the Victorian governess it is because we have read her story—or something which purports to be her story—in numerous novels of the day. For that reason any investigation into her life and times has to begin with the popular images, the confusions and the fantasies which have both familiarised the governess as an historical subject and, paradoxically, made her more remote.

The year 1847 marked the governess' arrival at the very heart of the English novel.¹ While she had been hovering on its edges since the end of the previous century, it was not until that year that a middle-class woman employed to teach the daughters of those better off than herself appeared as the central character in a major work. First on the scene was Becky Sharp, heroine or anti-heroine of William Thackeray's Vanity Fair, a governess who learns to rise through Regency society by means of her own energetic and amoral efforts.² Employed by a country baronet, she manages to carry off the son of the house before abandoning him when greater prizes beckon. Devious beyond dreaming, Becky manages to cheat, steal and lie without getting caught by the agents of social, moral and economic order who pursue her throughout her disreputable career. She ends the novel as the self-styled Lady Crawley, a raddled demi-mondaine condemned to live out the rest of her days in second-rate resorts, having long since been shunned by decent people. Her story is told in the third person by a buoyant, all-knowing narrator who sweeps his way confidently through the jostling, promiscuous panorama which is Vanity Fair. The tone is detached, ironic. Characters reveal themselves in their behaviour towards others, conceived by the narrator as puppets whose interior life remains opaque if, indeed, it exists at all.

That same year there appeared a book on a strikingly similar subject, for it too told the story of a young orphan obliged to go out as a governess who eventually marries a man of higher social status than herself. Yet Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre treated its material in a very different way.³ Told in the form of an autobiography, the drama of the book lies in the way in which Jane processes and then reacts to the fantastic events unfolding around her. Courted by her employer, she discovers at the altar that Mr Rochester is already married to the madwoman in the attic whose screams have previously disturbed and puzzled her. Fleeing to the moors, Jane takes refuge with her cousins before returning a year later to discover that the house where she once worked has been burned to the ground and that Mr Rochester, though blind, is now free to marry. Essentially an account of the social, moral and sexual development of its central character, Jane Eyre depends for its dramatic interest upon the densely plotted consciousness of its first-person narrator. The latter's quietly emphatic ‘Reader, I married him’ confirms the sense that her story has been told in the form of an intimate conversation between two individuals, between Jane and her reader.⁴

While contemporaries insisted upon seeing the two novels as bound together both by subject matter and by the real-life friendship of their authors, the marked differences in their conception and execution should warn against trying to identify a coherent genre of governess fiction. One has only to look at the vast array of novels featuring a governess which appeared between 1814 and 1865—one estimate has put the figure at around 140—to see the difficulties of classification.⁵ These books span virtually every category of fiction, including melodrama, morality tale and silver-spoon, as well as the more general territory into which both Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair fall. Fictional governesses are, according to the demands of the story in which they appear, wicked and pious, French and English, victims and schemers. They play both major and minor roles, are observed from the outside, and minutely plotted from within. They were created by men and by women; by women who had themselves once worked as governesses, as well as by those who had not. While the way the governess was portrayed in the novel shifted as the century progressed—in response to changes both in the conditions of her historical model as well as to internal developments in the form itself—what remains is a sense of the sheer range of fiction in which she appears. Far from defining a particular type of novel by her presence, the governess seems to have provided a figure or space in the fictional landscape which could be used by writers for a whole variety of literary ends.

The transformation of the governess into a major literary character was inseparable from the wider process of feminisation which the novel had been undergoing since the middle of the eighteenth century.⁶ Burgeoning levels of literacy amongst middle-class women, combined with the greater leisure time now available to them, fuelled a hunger for fiction which concerned itself with female experience. This, in turn, created a market for middle-class women writers only too happy to find a way of supporting themselves without having to embrace the stigma which came with waged work. Yet almost immediately a tension arose in the demands which these female writers and readers made upon the novel form. The novel had historically concerned itself with the social, moral and, above all, economic, journey of a man obliged to make his own way in the world without the normal resources of kith and kin. For female writers and readers these conventions presented problems, since women lacked access to the public world, the domain of action and doing, in which the narrative was necessarily set.

It was to ease this tension that the governess began to appear as a central character in the novel. On the one hand, she was an orphan, propelled by economic circumstances into taking a moral, geographic and social journey similar to that of any male hero. On the other hand, she was a middle-class woman who could be re-incorporated at the end of the narrative into the domestic sphere, the proper realm of women, by means of a conventional marriage plot. Winning a husband who could restore her to her rightful social position, if not advance it a little, represented a reworking of the hero's goal of economic self-sufficiency, while still resisting any challenge to a social order which insisted upon women's financial dependence on men. Thus the governess provided a point of entry into the novel for both the female writer and reader. For the former, she was the economically precarious woman who, like herself, was obliged to make a living whilst clinging to the status of a lady. In this case the governess' triumph in winning social and economic security functioned as a wish-fulfilment for the woman writer anxious about her own ambiguous status. For the reader, the governess became a daring alter-ego who could wander the world in a manner quite unthinkable for a young woman in more comfortable circumstances.

That the governess functioned within the novel as a symbol for all middle-class women, including those whose actual circumstances were far removed from her own, is clear from Emma, Jane Austen's novel of 1816.⁷ Although not yet working as a governess, Jane Fairfax has been educated explicitly with this end in mind. As a result she is prodigiously accomplished, able to sing, play and speak French with an ease which is secretly galling to Emma Woodhouse, who, as a young lady of independent means, is expected to excel in these subjects without any financial motivation to spur her on. As it turns out, Jane's secret engagement to Frank Churchill, a young man of some fortune, means that she will not have to seek work in the schoolroom but can instead look forward to the socially and financially secure life of a married woman. Within the terms which Jane Austen sets out in Emma, the highly-skilled and accomplished governess represents both an ideal of refined ladyhood and, in her likely spinsterhood and poverty, its antithesis. The only thing which divides governesses from ladies is the attainment of a husband (Emma's own governess has recently quitted her post on her marriage to the gentlemanly Mr Weston). Far from being some remote horror, becoming a governess is revealed within the novel as the fate which shadows all middle-class women except for those lucky few who, like Emma, are absolutely assured of their own fortune.

Once this elision had been made between the governess and all middle-class women, the way was open for novelists to use her to explore far more than life in the schoolroom. As a lady who was nonetheless exempt from some of the more constricting aspects of ladyhood, she represented the perfect place to mount an enquiry into the social and moral codes which middle-class women were increasingly obliged to observe. The governess' situation within the household, her relationship with her pupils, her choice of a marriage partner, could all be represented as a discussion about the governess' unusual and uncomfortable situation, while at another level functioning as an examination of genteel femininity in action. The following passage from Jane Eyre shows how the process worked. At its opening the ostensible subject is Jane-as-governess, but two thirds of the way through the more radical possibility emerges that it is actually Jane-as-woman who is under discussion:

I climbed the three staircases, raised the trapdoor of the attic, and having reached the leads, looked out afar over sequestered field and hill, and along dim skyline—that then I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen; that then I desired more of practical experience than I possessed; more of intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character, than was here within my reach. I valued what was good in Mrs Fairfax and what was good in Adele; but I believed in the existence of other and more vivid kinds of goodness, and what I belied in I wished to behold.

Who blames me? Many, no doubt: and I shall be called discontented. I could not help it; the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes …

It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally; but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.⁸

Jane starts with a set of grievances which appear to arise from her position as a governess: that she lives in an isolated region with only a child and an old housekeeper for company; that she has no access to people of her own temperament; that she longs for more ‘practical experience’. These are complaints which are familiar from the public discussion of the governess' ‘plight’: Jane's revolt, as articulated in the first paragraph of this extract, can be accommodated, understood and even excused. Only with the sentence beginning ‘women are supposed to be very calm generally’ is it revealed that Jane is talking not about herself as a governess but herself as a middle-class woman. In this case, the companionship of children and old domestics becomes the lot of bourgeois women generally while the ‘busy world’ Jane longs for is not so much a position in an urban household but rather the public world of literature and the professions, the world occupied by men. It is only once the subject is made explicit—‘women are supposed. …’—that the pent-up torrent of puddings, stockings and pianos is released. Early in the passage Jane asks, disingenuously, ‘Who will blame me?’, anticipating that while many will, many will not: everyone knows that being a governess is a rotten deal. Only subsequently, when it becomes clear that her discontent arises from her experience as a middle-class woman, does that question ‘Who will blame me?’ take on an altogether more urgent edge.

The fictional governess was not always made to serve such subversive ends. Two novels of the 1840s, Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë⁹ and Amy Herbert by Elizabeth Sewell,¹⁰ both use her ambiguous status as a way of conducting an essentially conservative enquiry into the social and moral responsibilities of ladyhood. In both texts a sharp distinction is set up between the governess, a clergyman's daughter of high ideals and behaviour, and the selfish and, by implication, slightly vulgar people for whom she works. Agnes Grey, for instance, finds herself in the employment first of the middle-class Bloomfield family, and subsequently of the aristocratic Murrays. The Bloomfields indulge their brutish children to excess, them dismiss Agnes when she is unable to exert control over them. Mrs Murray does much the same, keeping up a running commentary of complaints against Agnes while doing nothing to control the infuriating behaviour of her teenage daughters. Interested only in men, clothes, horses and dogs, Rosalie and Matilda Murray refuse to occupy themselves with the church-going and poor-visiting which, as squire's daughters, should be their proper concern. The quiet and sober Agnes Grey, by contrast, carries out these duties on their behalf and is rewarded with the love of the curate, Mr Weston. Rosalie Murray, meanwhile, finishes the story with a loveless match to the wealthy but degraded Sir Thomas Ashby.

Emily Morton, the governess in Amy Herbert, undergoes a sensationalised version of the trials of Agnes Grey. Her employers, the Harringtons, may be gentry, but they are more concerned with wealth and status than with their social responsibilities. While the orphaned clergyman's daughter Emily Morton is beautiful and good, her elder pupils Dora and Margaret are rude, dishonest and mainly concerned with getting their governess into trouble. Emily is sacked when her youngest charge is fatally injured and the blame laid unjustly at her door. Her innocence eventually revealed, Emily is taken in by the Herberts (Mrs Herbert is the sister of Mrs Harrington and mother of the eponymous Amy), where she becomes a much-loved member of a thoroughly Christian home. Elizabeth Sewell uses the contrast between Emily Morton's behaviour and that of the Harringtons to dramatise Christian gentility in action. Although Emily may appear shabby (the footman mistakes her for a maid) she has the breeding and virtue of a real lady. Her pupils, by contrast, exhibit all the moral refinement of fishwives. The young Amy's attempt to puzzle out just where Emily Morton stands in the social and moral hierarchy allows the author to present a series of Sunday School homilies, designed to remind her young female readers of the obligations attached to their (assumed) status as ladies.

While she could not be more different from the saintly Emily Morton, Becky Sharp serves a similar moral and literary purpose within the pages of Vanity Fair. Like Emily Morton and, indeed, Jane Eyre and Jane Fairfax, Becky is an orphan without fortune who has been educated specifically with her future role in mind. Significantly Becky's late mother was French, a fact which hints at a certain moral turpitude, most particularly with regard to truth-telling and sexual conduct. In the event, Becky turns out to be scandalously wicked, the absolute antithesis of all ladylike virtues as represented by her best friend and schoolmate Amelia Sedley. Far from functioning as a model against which the moral inadequacy of the other female characters may be shown up, the figure of Becky is a measure of just how debased society has become. If a wild and wicked woman such as this has been installed at the heart of the Christian English home, implies the narrator, then all indeed must be Vanity Fair.

The manner in which Becky Sharp became the shadow of the more conventionally heroic Amelia Sedley prefigured a phenomenon increasingly common in the cheap, melodramatic ‘railway’ novels of the 1850s and 60s. Earlier books like Amy Herbert relied upon a generalised contrast between the governess and a series of financially secure women, most typically her pupils and her employers, to create moral and dramatic tension. Others, such as Agnes Grey and Jane Eyre, used the internal struggles of the fictional autobiographer as a way of voicing the debate over the nature of female experience. As those struggles became increasingly intense the female figure at the centre of the novel split in two and the contradictions which she had previously strained to contain were now externalised and embodied in the twinned figures of the governess and the lady. As with Becky and Amelia, these pairings were used to demonstrate a series of oppositions—dark/light, sin/virtue, virgin/prostitute—which were believed to express the dual aspect of female nature. This time, however, it was the lady who embodied all the traditional virtues associated with Christian gentility, leaving the governess to represent those darker qualities which had been repressed from the dominant ideal.

One book which sensationally organizes itself around this governess/lady pairing is Mrs Henry Wood's best-seller of 1861, East Lynne.¹¹ It tells the story of the beautiful aristocrat Lady Isabel Vane who, as a result of a momentary madness, leaves her husband Archibald Carlyle and her beloved children for an affair with the weak and wicked Francis Leaveson. Swiftly abandoned by Leaveson in France, and hideously disfigured by a railway accident in which she has been reported dead, Lady Isabel returns to East Lynne to take up the position of governess to her own children. Disguised by her facial scars and the curious costume she adopts, Vane is able to live undetected in the home where once she was mistress. That position is now taken by Barbara Hare, Carlyle's second wife, a model of genteel virtue. Fair where Isabel is dark, faithful where she has been flightly, maternal where she was sexual, Barbara represents the ideal of English motherhood from which the governess has fallen, the Madonna to Isabel's Whore. Significantly, there is only space for the two women in the book as long as they continue to embody these polarities. Once Lady Isabel has been recognised and forgiven by Carlyle, she is no longer required to live out the darker side of female nature, and her harrowing deathbed scene effectively brings the narrative swiftly to a close.

While East Lynne stays just this side of melodrama, rooting itself in a recognisable social landscape, Uncle Silas, the 1864 novel by Sheridan Le Fanu, represents a flight into the fantastic.¹² Foisted on the motherless Maud Ruthyn by her remote father, Madame de la Rougierre embodies the worst qualities associated with Frenchness or, more particularly, with French governesses. She drinks, lies, uses rouge, wears a wig and steals from her pupil. Worst of all, she doesn't speak English. Within the text she is paired with Maud's fifty-year-old cousin, Lady Knollys. While by no means a pasteboard version of virtue, Lady Knollys embodies the more attractive qualities associated with English gentility. Kind, unpretentious, and completely lacking in guile, she acts as protectress to Maud, warning her against the sinister de la Rougierre, who turns out to be involved in a plot to murder her pupil.

By 1864 the passage of the governess through every type of novel and to every literary end was virtually complete, although she continued to turn up as late as 1907-9, when she appeared in Henry James' The Turn of the Screw.¹³ From being the barely-named shadow of the English gentlewoman in Emma, she became the model of genteel virtue to which every lady should aspire in Amy Herbert. In Jane Eyre she was used to explore the social and intellectual limitations laid upon all bourgeois women, while in Vanity Fair her function was to point up the moral feebleness of the existing social order. In East Lynne she served as a dreadful warning to those English gentlewomen who failed to live up to the moral responsibilities attendant upon their social position, while in Uncle Silas she was the embodiment of evil which threatened the well-being of the genteel Christian home.

The problem remains, however, as to what the fictional governess can be assumed to tell us about the historical figure upon which she is based. The fact that many of the authors of these novels had direct personal experience of the schoolroom only reinforces the confusion about where documentary ends and fantasy begins.¹⁴ Even today, at the end of the twentieth century, our perceptions of the Victorian governess are based on nothing more solid than hazy recollections of Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair. Yet the fact remains that few of the 25,000 women who were working in the home schoolroom in the middle of the century would have recognised themselves from the fiction of the day. Unlike Jane and Becky the governess seldom married into her employer's family; unlike Emily Morton she did not often find herself accused of causing her pupil's death; unlike Madame de la Rougierre it was unusual for her to embark upon murder and, unlike Isabel Vane, she was not frequently called upon to don an elaborate disguise. In short, the reality of the governess' life was at once more prosaic and more complex than anything experienced by her fictional counterpart. …

Notes

1. My discussion of the fictional governess is indebted to Susan A. Nash, ‘“Wanting A Situation”: Governesses and Victorian Novels’, unpublished PhD thesis, Rutgers, State University of New Jersey, (New Brunswick, 1980).

2. William Thackeray, Vanity Fair (Harmondsworth, 1968; first pub., London, 1848). Vanity Fair appeared in monthly installments from January 1847 before being published in novel form in 1848.

3. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Harmondsworth, 1966; first pub., London, 1847).

4. Ibid., p. 474.

5. For a list of Victorian novels which have either a governess as a main protagonist, or contain a statement about the nature of governessing, see Susan A. Nash, “‘Wanting A Situation’”, appendix c., pp. 437-44.

6. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (London, 1972), pp. 171-72. See also Terry Lovell, Consuming Fiction (London 1987).

7. Jane Austen, Emma (Harmondsworth, 1966; first pub., London, 1816).

8. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, pp. 140-141.

9. Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey (Harmondsworth, 1988; first pub., 1847).

10. Elizabeth M. Sewell, Amy Herbert 2 vols. (London, 1844).

11. Mrs Henry Wood, East Lynne (London, 1861).

12. Sheridan Le Fanu, Uncle Silas (London, 1864).

13. Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (Harmondsworth, 1986; first pub., New York, 1907-9).

14. Anne and Charlotte Brontë had both worked as governesses; Elizabeth Sewell ran a school with her sisters; William Thackeray relied on governesses to look after his children, since his wife's ill-health prevented her from doing so.