SOURCE: “Sheridan Le Fanu's Ungovernable Governesses,” in Studies in the Novel, Vol. 29, No. 2, Summer, 1997, pp. 214-37.

In the following essay, Mangum explores how the grotesque, abusive, powerful, and gender-ambivalent governesses in Le Fanu's short stories and novels challenge traditional patriarchal authority and threaten domestic order.

The stereotypical down-trodden, ill-used Victorian governess abandons her abject demeanor and launches into the domestic fray over social and cultural authority in the work of Anglo-Irish short story writer, novelist, journalist, and editor, Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873). Duplicitous, grotesque, alcoholic, foreign, and gender-ambivalent, the governesses that haunt his short stories, his best-known novel Uncle Silas (1864), and the lesser-known novel A Lost Name (1868) could be unrepressed ids of any number of their living and fictional contemporaries. Le Fanu's figure synthesizes cultural constructions of the Victorian governess—sociological studies that protested the governess's plight, advice columns that alternately defended the governess and warned employers to...