The Perfect Plot Device
Dinah Birch: Governesses, 17 July 2008
Other People’s Daughters: The Life and Times of the Governess
by Ruth Brandon.
Weidenfeld, 303 pp., £20, March 2008,978 0 297 85113 4 Show More
by Ruth Brandon.
Weidenfeld, 303 pp., £20, March 2008,
“... better get me a grey frieze livery and a straw poke, such as my aunt’s charity children wear.’ George Eliot’s Gwendolen Harleth is sour because it looks as though she will have to support her family by teaching the daughters of a bishop, but most would have shared her depression at the prospect. The efforts of the governess were exploited and ... ”