Novel Lessons: Reading the Governess in the English Novel of the Long Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Governesses abound in the English novel of the long nineteenth century, representing the challenges faced by unmarried middle-class women who sought to retain their respectability while earning a wage, and an educational system that primarily aimed to prepare young women for the marriage market. This thesis considers the governess as a teacher, and in relation to the Bildungsroman and the marriage plot, illustrating how the governess is formed in and by the novel, and what the governess can teach us about the novel form. In striving to address the governess as an educator, rather than primarily or exclusively as a woman or an instance of class precarity, the thesis frequently encounters the novel’s tendency to obfuscate the governess’s work. However, through its argument that the governess’s significance for the novel is often predicated on the apparent insignificance of her labour, the thesis allows the governess to be understood both within particular educational, social and cultural institutions and frameworks, and in relation to the novel, which is theorised as an important repository, exemplar and instrument of pedagogy.

By tracing governess characters in a series of novels written by women, this thesis illuminates complex workings of character and plot, and the capacity of the governess to comment upon, question, augment and destablilise stories of education and development. Chapter 1 focuses on the minor governess characters in Burney’s Camilla (1796) and Austen’s Emma (1815), chapter 2 on the governess as heroine in Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey (1847) and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), chapter 3 on the governesses in disguise in Gaskell’s Ruth (1853) and Wood’s East Lynne (1861), and chapter 4 on the governess’s moves abroad in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) and Richardson’s Pointed Roofs (1915). Reading these pairs of novels side-by-side facilitates interrogations of the shape and direction of the English novel’s plots and pedagogies.