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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 social inequality flowed, however, in an unexpected way. Many governesses, more ladylike than their employers, were expected to give a sheen of social elegance to the children of the nouveaux riches. Resentment tended to flow both from the employers and from the servants’ hall. ‘I don’t like them governesses, Pinner,’ the cook in Vanity Fair says of Becky Sharp. ‘They give themselves the hairs and hupstarts of ladies, and their wages is no better than you nor me.’ The ugly situation was very clear to the more thoughtful women in this class. ‘I should be shut out from society,’ Mary Wollstonecraft wrote, ‘and be debarred the imperfect pleasures of friendship — as I should on every side be surrounded by unequals.’

Brandon approaches the subject through a group of women who left their own accounts of their lives through letters and diaries. By their nature, these are mostly extraordinary cases, such as Mary Wollstonecraft and her sisters. There is a chapter about Clair Claremont, the mistress of Byron and Shelley, immortalised in old age by Henry James in The Aspern Papers. She had a long and extraordinary life, but Brandon would have done better to have focussed purely on her governessing episode in Russia. The Russian gentry had a habit of employing English governesses; there are some unforgettable ones in Chekhov, including the one who sits imperturbably fishing as all the men of the party take their clothes off to go swimming. It seems not just a very brave thing for Claremont to have done, but one born of desperation.

A more imperial adventure is supplied by the celebrated Anna Leonowens, governess to the children of the King of Siam, and subsequently a Rodgers and Hammerstein heroine. I wouldn’t believe a word that Leonowens says in her memoirs, and people have seriously doubted whether she ever laid eyes upon the king. Her books are only interesting in setting out what the 19th century believed governesses to be capable of, when placed in the setting of the empire at its height. The one truly typical story here, perhaps, is that of a crushed and struggling woman, Nelly Weeton. We only know about her because she wrote a journal, discovered long after her death, cataloguing with great ill-humour and resentment the treatment she received at the hands of her drunken and snobbish employers, her bullying father and brother and ultimately an appalling husband. She’s not an attractive figure, full of self-pity and complaint, but her tragic story shows how much governesses at the bottom end of the market had to put up with.

The end came with the establishment of women’s colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, and with the success, after much failure, of seriously constituted girls’ schools. Brandon’s last chapter is concerned with Barbara Bodichon and Bessie Belloc, Hilaire Belloc’s mother, and the founding of Girton. Neither of them was a governess in any sense, and their larger venture put an end to the haphazard nature of the governess’s learning. The governess’s days were numbered for all practical purposes; no Girtonian would have set her sights so low in terms of a career, and soon very few women were forced to. From the place they occupied in the English imagination, however, they were not to be so easily dislodged.

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