SOURCE: “The Victorian Governess: Status Incongruence in Family and Society,” in Victorian Studies, Vol. 14, No. 1, September, 1970, pp. 7-26.

In the following essay, Peterson considers the role of the governess within the Victorian middle-class family, focusing primarily on the incongruencies inherent in the notion of “employed gentlewoman.”

The governess is a familiar figure to the reader of victorian novels. Immortalized in Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair, she has made frequent appearances as the heroine of many lesser-known novels. And innumerable governesses appear as little more than a standard furnishing in many a fictional Victorian home. While twentieth-century acquaintance with the governess may come purely from the novel, the Victorians themselves found her situation and prospects widely discussed, frivolously in Punch, and more seriously in many of the leading journals of the time, so often in fact that one author on the subject of female labor in Great Britain suggested...