Author: Ruth Brandon
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0802779751
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 315
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Book Description
Between the 1780s and the end of the nineteenth century, an army of sad women took up residence in other people's homes, part and yet not part of the family, not servants, yet not equals. To become a governess, observed Jane Austen in Emma, was to "retire from all the pleasures of life, of rational intercourse, equal society, peace and hope, to penance and mortification for ever." However, in an ironic paradox, the governess, so marginal to her society, was central to its fiction-partly because governessing was the fate of some exceptionally talented women who later wrote novels based on their experiences. But personal experience was only one source, and writers like Wilkie Collins, William Makepeace Thackeray, Henry James, and Jane Austen all recognized that the governess's solitary figure, adrift in the world, offered more novelistic scope than did the constrained and respectable wife. Ruth Brandon weaves literary and social history with details from the lives of actual governesses, drawn from their letters and journals, to craft a rare portrait of real women whose lives were in stark contrast to the romantic tales of their fictional counterparts. Governess will resonate with the many fans of Jane Austen and the Brontës, whose novels continue to inspire films and books, as well as fans of The Nanny Diaries and other books that explore the longstanding tension between mothers and the women they hire to raise their children.
Author: Lewis Carroll
Publisher: London ; New York : Macmillan
ISBN:
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 434
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Book Description
First published in 1889, this novel has two main plots; one set in the real world at the time the book was published (the Victorian era), the other in the fictional world of Fairyland.
Author: Kathryn Hughes
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9781852853259
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
The figure of the governess is very familiar from nineteenth-century literature. Much less is known about the governess in reality. This book is the first rounded exploration of what the life of the home schoolroom was actually like. Drawing on original diaries and a variety of previously undiscovered sources, Kathryn Hughes describes why the period 1840-80 was the classic age of governesses. She examines their numbers, recruitment, teaching methods, social position and prospects. The governess provides a key to the central Victorian concept of the lady. Her education consisted of a series of accomplishments designed to attract a husband able to keep her in the style to which she had become accustomed from birth. Becoming a governess was the only acceptable way of earning money open to a lady whose family could not support her in leisure. Being paid to educate another woman's children set in play a series of social and emotional tensions. The governess was a surrogate mother, who was herself childless, a young woman whose marriage prospects were restricted, and a family member who was sometimes mistaken for a servant.
Author: Ruth Brandon
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN: 1780222483
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 218
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Book Description
A rich and fascinating account of the lives of Victorian governesses, exploring nineteenth-century attitudes to women, family and class. If a nineteenth century lady had neither a husband to support her nor money of her own, almost her only recourse was to live in someone else's household and educate their children - in particular, their daughters. Marooned within the confines of other people's lives, neither servants nor family members, governesses occupied an uncomfortable social limbo. And being poor and insignificant, their papers were mostly lost. But a few journals and letters have come down to us, giving a vivid record of what it was to be a lone professional woman at a time when such a creature officially did not exist.
Author: Lewis Carroll
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fairies
Languages : en
Pages : 358
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Book Description
Two fairy children have adventures in such plances as Dogland, Outland, and Elfland.
Author: Julia Kelly
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501139339
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 136
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Book Description
This delightfully charming and saucy Regency era romance, is first in the Governess series in which three best friends are employed as governesses for different families, and all find themselves wanting something they can’t have. Elizabeth Porter is quite happy with her position as the governess for two sneaky-yet-sweet girls when she notices that they have a penchant for falling ill and needing the doctor. As the visits from the dashing and handsome Doctor Edward Fellows become more frequent, Elizabeth quickly sees through the lovesick girls’ ruse. Yet even Elizabeth can’t help but notice Edward’s bewitching bedside manner even as she tries to convince herself that someone of her station would not make a suitable wife for a doctor. But one little kiss won’t hurt...
Author: Stephen Regan
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415238281
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 594
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Book Description
Provides a valuable selection of nineteenth- century essays on the art of fiction. These contemporary essays are strategically placed alongside a selection of modern critical responses to twelve familiar nineteenth-century novels.
Author: Monica F. Cohen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521591414
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234
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Book Description
Much attention has recently been given by scholars to the widening of the gender gap in the nineteenth century and the concept of separate spheres. Testing such constructions, and questioning the stereotypes associated with Victorian domesticity, Monica F. Cohen offers new readings of narratives by Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Eden, Gaskell, Oliphant and Reade to show how domestic work, the most feminine of all activities, gained much of its social credibility by positioning itself in relation to the emergent professions. By exploring how novels cast the Victorian conception of female morality into the vocabulary of nineteenth-century professionalism, Cohen traces the ways in which women sought identity and privilege within a professionalised culture, and revises our understanding of Victorian domestic ideology.
Author: Julie Klassen
Publisher: Bethany House
ISBN: 0764207075
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 394
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Book Description
A dangerous secret...an overheard conversation...and a woman who is not what she seems. Will hidden pasts ruin their hope of finding love?
Author: Dennis Walder
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136750053
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 374
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Book Description
The Nineteenth-Century Novel: Identities provides an ideal starting point for understanding gender in the novels of this period. It explores the place of fiction in constructing gender identity within society at large, considering Madame Bovary, Portrait of a Lady and The Woman in White. The book continues with a consideration of the novel at the fin de siecle, examining Dracula, The Awakening and Heart of Darkness. These fascinating essays illuminate the ways in which the conventions of realism were disrupted as much by anxieties surrounding colonialism, decadence, degeneration and the 'New Woman' as by those new ideas about human psychology which heralded the advent of psychoanalysis. The concepts which are crucial to the understanding of the literature and society of the nineteenth century are brilliantly explained and discussed in this essential volume.
