Ruth Brandon

Ms. Brandon uses letters and journals of 19th century governesses as the basis of this book. Of necessity, this restricts what she can explore to women who were likely more able than the run-of-the- mill governess in a middle class family at the midpoint of the century. The burden of her book is that these women were poorly educated and guaranteed that their students would be poorly educated too, thus perpetuating the prevailing belief that a woman's place suitable to her abilities would be in the home. A sadness is that even the leaders, with few exceptions in what passed for a women's movement, subscribed to the idea that women should be subordinate to men and, "complet(e), sweeten, and embellish the existence of others." (W.R. Greg in "Why are Women Redundant?", 1862)

Governesses led lonely, bitter, precarious lives. My own quarrel with the book is the length of time she spent with Mary Wollstonecraft and her sisters and with Claire Clairmont because I had already read a fair amount about them. She also spends some time with the Codrington vs Codrington divorce case, which Emma Donaghue fictionalized in [The Sealed Letter]. That aside, this book is well-researched, well written, yet somehow emotionally detached from its subjects. I took an unconscionable amount of time to read it, but I'm glad that I did and glad to be moving on to something else.… (mehr)