SOURCE: “The Anathematized Race: The Governess and Jane Eyre,” in Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England, University of Chicago Press, 1988, pp. 126-63.

In the following essay, Poovey focuses on the vast amount of attention given to the “plight” of the governess during the 1840s and 1850s, examining such factors as social stability, the Victorian notion of the domestic ideal, and the increasing economic independence of women.

The governess was a familiar figure to midcentury middle-class Victorians, just as she is now to readers of Victorian novels.¹ Even before Becky Sharp and Jane Eyre gave names to the psychological type of the governess, her “plight” was the subject of numerous 1830s novels; by the 1840s, the governess had become a subject of concern to periodical essayists as well. In part, the attention the governess received in the 1840s was a response to the annual reports...