Survey of governesses, the vanished profession

GOVERNESS: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE REAL JANE EYRES

By Ruth Brandon

Walker & Company, $25.99, 303 pages. illus.

REVIEWED BY MARTIN RUBIN

Jane Eyre, who not surprisingly finds herself in the subtitle of this informative book, is in the minds of many people the archetypal governess, yet there could have been few less typical either as to character or destiny. Her creator, Charlotte Bronte, though, knew her stuff on the subject from personal experience: She had herself been a governess at the beggarly salary of 20 pounds per annum.

In “Governess,” British writer Ruth Brandon has produced a masterly survey of her subject, drawing on reminiscences and all manner of other primary and secondary sources to produce a rounded portrait of a vanished profession. In the 20th century, the English novelist Elizabeth Taylor (1912-1975) must have been one of the last writers to herself have been a governess, something which is reflected in her fiction.

Her friend and fellow novelist, Elizabeth Jane Howard, must surely be the last living writer today who received her education from a governess; and who can forget her fond and memorable creation, Miss Millament, in her Cazalet novels?

But a century and a half ago, governesses were very much to the fore. As Ms. Brandon writes at the outset of her book:

“If a middle-class woman had neither a husband to support her nor money of her own, this was almost the only way in which society allowed her to earn a living. In the 1851 census, 25,000 women — that is, 2 per cent of all unmarried women between twenty and forty — described themselves as governesses … . Since no middle-class woman worked unless circumstances compelled her to do so, that 2 percent must mean that almost every respectable lady who was forced to earn her own living became a governess.”

In providing a solid sociological background to her story of individual — and mostly extraordinary — cases alongside references to the numerous fictional portraits of the profession, she ensures a necessary ballast. But even when donning her sociologist”s hat, she is still lively as well as humane:

“[These governesses] were also vulnerable in ways that middle-class people are rarely vulnerable now. Blown here and there at the mercy of an arbitrary and uncertain market, they knew that without employment they lost the means to buy food, the decent clothes that might secure their next situation — and a roof over their head.”

Ms. Brandon has understandably and correctly limited her study to the heyday of the governess. This was basically the 19th century, although she does include the extraordinary and celebrated Mary Wollstonecraft (who went on to write the pioneering feminist work, “A Vindication of the Rights of Women” and give birth to Mary Shelley, author of “Frankenstein”) and the lesser known Agnes Potter from the 18th.

Not surprisingly, with the exception of women like Potter, Ms. Brandon has chosen to concentrate on celebrated figures. This has its dangers, since they tend to have been fully explored by others, yet on the whole she has managed to provide fresh accounts.

This is even true of the much portrayed Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelley”s step-sister and the mother of Byron’s daughter Allegra, who was driven by economic necessity to be a governess in Italy, Russia and London before finally being rescued by the legacy left to her by Percy Bysshe Shelley which could only be paid on the death of his father 22 years after his own.

With her scandalous past, Claire served as the model for Henry James’ governess in “The Aspern Papers” and does not usually emerge sympathetically from most accounts of the Shelley circle, despite her and her ill-fated daughter’s appallingly cruel treatment at Byron’s hands. But who could not sympathize with the woman who wrote this account of her harried, uncomfortable penurious life as a daily governess in London?

“This is now my life — I go by nine to Mrs. Kitchener’s where I give lessons till one — then I rush to the top of Wilton Place and get a Richmond Omnibus … to give a lesson to the Cohens … . That vile Omnibus takes two hours to get to Richmond and the same to come back and so with giving my lessons I am never at home before seven — I get no dinner — nothing within my lips from eight in the morning till seven at night.”

In recounting the life and legends of Anna Leonowens, governess to the wives and children of the King of Siam in the 1860s, Ms. Brandon does an excellent job of deconstructing the mythmaking that, a century later, would result in the hit Broadway musical and film “The King and I.” In telling the actual travails of this woman who was nothing like Deborah Kerr to put it mildly, this book serves forth more incident and true drama than Leonowens’ lurid embroidering in her overheated memoirs, apparently largely motivated by a desperate need for money. Add to this wonderful, little known details such as the actor Boris Karloff being Anna’s great nephew, and you have a book about what might have been a worthy dry topic instead fairly sizzling with fascination.

Martin Rubin is a writer and critic in Pasadena, Calif.