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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Other People’s Daughters: The Life and Times of Governesses

The uneasy world between

Philip Hensher on Ruth Brandon's new book

The literary role is so useful that it long survived the rise of women’s education, and, indeed, women’s introduction into the professional classes. Elizabeth Taylor and Ivy Compton-Burnett are still writing about governesses well after the second world war. In Compton-Burnett’s case, she usually treated them with all the contempt she could muster, probably because she herself was so often presumed to have been a governess when young, on the basis of her social manner. (Robert Liddell used to fantasise that Ivy had been a governess in the House of Atreus). Nowadays, nannies have taken over many of the roles of the old governesses, often being asked in W11 to speak French or Mandarin and instil some of the abilities that used to be referred to as accomplishments. They occupy the uneasy world between employee and companion, rivals with mothers for a child’s devotion, and are often, as in the 19th century, rather more graceful than their newly rich employers. A fictional revival of this versatile and memorable class of being is surely long overdue.

Ruth Brandon’s book addresses a remarkably interesting subject, exploring the real-life experiences that supplied so rich a vein of literature. It has numerous ramifications, and the surrounding subjects of the drive for women’s formal education and the oppressive legal nature that the 19th-century alternative of marriage was formed by are covered as well.

The governess was often perceived as being an emotional and social threat. Many gentlewomen were forced into the role by some financial catastrophe, reminding the families they worked for of a terrible possibility. Moreover, their intimacy with children often roused the mother’s hostility, and a war for the child’s love was the result. By the middle of the century, a spate of bank failures had hugely oversupplied the market with under- educated would-be governesses, some of whom were reduced to working for £20 a year, or even for nothing except bed and board. What happened to these when they grew too old to work — perhaps only at 40 — does not bear thinking about. Only very few governesses earned more than £200 a year; Sir George Stephen in 1844 only found a dozen. Charlotte Brontë, paid £20 a year in 1841, was much more typical.

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