The Poor Governess

Author’s Note

Author’s NoteThe Governess’s lot in the Victorian and Edwardian era was often miserable and frightening as I have described in this novel. My mother always said she was so sorry for them as if they talked they were considered ‘forward’ and if they were silent ‘dull’.

A pretty Governess was also too often considered fair game and I remember hearing a well-known ‘dasher’ of my mother’s generation saying,

“There was a jolly pretty Governess in one house I visited. I was considering seducing her, but thought it unfair. Then, damn me, I learnt that my best friend had got there first!”

Between upstairs and downstairs and often ignored by both, a Governess was lonely and isolated.

But there was no other career open to respectable young women at that time except to be a companion to an old and usually disagreeable Dowager.