a gallimaufry

On governesses in adult & children's fiction

I was thinking about fictional governesses, as I’ve just read two gothicky novels of the 1960s featuring them as heroes: Joan Aiken’s The Silence of Herondale and Mary Stewart’s Nine Coaches Waiting. Although it was serendipitous that I read one after the other, there are striking similarities between them. Both play on the reader’s knowledge of the ur-governess novel, Jane Eyre, and feature resourceful heroines, madness, secrets and romance – plus the addition of sinister accidents which keep befalling the child for whom they’re responsible.

Joan Aiken’s approach is playful. In The Silence of Herondale, Deborah Lindsey finds herself in an isolated house on the snowy Yorkshire moors with a child prodigy to care for, a dark and stormy young man and ‘the Slipper Killer’ on the loose from Broadmoor. Mary Stewart’s heroine, Linda, refers overtly to Jane Eyre as she takes up her position in the Château Valmy – as well as drawing on other literary references such as Macbeth and The Duchess of Malfi. Nine Coaches Waiting hews much more closely to Jane Eyre than does the Aiken novel. The Rochester figure – darker and more troubling than Aiken’s Jeremy – is actually split between Léon, Raoul and Philippe. There is a party with a beautiful blonde, a mad woman, a flight through the countryside. It is all very cleverly done and it is one of my favourites of Stewart’s novels.

Both Linda and Deborah are young, brave, practical and kind. What about other fictional governesses? I hypothesised that governesses in adult fiction are generally sympathetically portrayed, and those in children’s fiction are not, and this is because of the power differential. For adults, the governess is a vulnerable figure, caught between two layers of society. For children, the governess is a symbol of unwanted authority. But how true is that? Bearing in mind this is only drawing on novels that I’ve read and can remember reading...

The first governess in fiction I can think of is Miss Taylor, in Emma, who becomes Mrs Weston. She is sympathetically portrayed, kind and sensible. Then there is Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey, and Charles Dickens’s Ruth Pecksniff from Martin Chuzzlewit. Again, we warm to them and sympathise with their plight, poorly treated and exploited by their employers.

But complications with my thesis now set in. Being a governess to her own children, who do not know her, is the punishment endured by Lady Isabel Vane in East Lynne (Mrs Henry Wood) for her adultery – she has slid down the social scale. Miss Wade’s treatment in Little Dorrit contributes to souring her. Not every governess will have a happy ending or survive her work unscathed. Further: she may pose a threat, stepping outside her class and failing to know her place. Becky Sharp (Vanity Fair; William Makepeace Thackaray) and Lucy Graham (Lady Audley’s Secret; Mary Elizabeth Braddon) turn the tables, using their somewhat liminal social position to marry up and improve their status, and this is portrayed as threatening. Worst of all must be witchy Madame de la Rougierre, the murderous governess in Uncle Silas (Sheridan Le Fanu). Not only does she have the dubious social position of being a governess, but she’s French.

The last governess I can think of in adult fiction is the narrator of The Turn of the Screw. Here the character’s uncertain social status is reflected in her experience of an uncertain reality – whether it is her own disintegrating mental health or the supernatural intruding grotesquely into her charges’ lives.

Disappointingly, I am very limited when it comes to governesses in children’s literature. This makes my hypothesis – even thinner. The two magnificent villainesses who spring to mind are Sylvia Daisy Pouncer (The Midnight Folk by John Masefield) and Miss Slighcarp (The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken). Miss Pouncer is literally a broomstick-flying witch, who looks both old and young, confiscates toys and forces poor Kay to learn Latin declensions. She returns in The Box of Delights as the wife of wicked Abner Brown. Miss Slighcarp, tall and bony, cannot practise magic but is similarly cruel – wolflike, even – and intends to deprive Bonnie of her inheritance. These ladies are perhaps heirs to Madame de la Rougierre.

They are counterbalanced by the lovely Miss Heliotrope, Maria’s kind and elderly governess in The Little White Horse (Elizabeth Goudge). Unfortunately, I have an unusual copy of The Little White Horse: I often notice it – and even think, ah, there it is! – but when I actually want to find it, it vanishes. So I cannot refresh my memory of Miss Heliotrope at the moment, except that I think she has forget-me-not blue eyes, mild ill health and a large nose, and finds happiness marrying the Old Parson.

Thus, I can only find three examples of governesses of children’s literature and one of these apparently disproves my hypothesis that they are always portrayed unsympathetically. However, I would argue that Miss Heliotrope bucks the trend because she is very clearly without much power, thus closer to the governesses in adult fiction than the domineering figures in children’s literature. And my brief survey of adult literature suggests that while some novels treat governesses with sympathy, alert to their ambiguous position in the household, others perceive them as disturbing or even threatening the established order because of this position.

So – do you agree? Can you think of some more fictional governesses? What happens if we add lady companions to the mix, I wonder?

(Illustration from Jane Eyre by Edward A. Wilson; Illustrated Modern Library, 1944; illustration of Becky Sharp up to no good from Vanity Fair by Lewis Baumer; Hodder & Stoughton, 1913; illustration from The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Pat Marriott; Jonathan Cape, 1962)

catching up

Oh dear! Where did the time go? I am almost embarrassed to come back here after so long. How are you all? Did you enjoy the summer?

I have mainly been having a lovely time. International travelling rules were relaxed just in time for me to pop over to the UK in August to see my family. I fell upon the charity bookshops of Ipswich with joy and managed a small but respectable haul (I am limited by what I can carry back on the Eurostar and my suitcase also held the Folio Society edition of The Lord of the Rings which is possibly the heaviest three-volume set ever published, my arms are now six inches longer).

Here is my swag, rounded out with a few books I filched from my mother’s box of books to go to Oxfam:

But! Not a single work by Storm Jameson! It seems my dreams of second-hand bookshops stuffed with her books are indeed dreams with no basis in reality. Bother.

I have mentioned before that I decided to rearrange the majority of my fiction, poetry and plays chronologically. Dear friends, do not do this. In theory it was a wonderful plan which would reveal very clearly the development of (mainly) English literature; in practice it is difficult to sustain because you have to keep checking publication dates every time you want to shelve a book (so you don’t bother and shove books in where there’s space and then everything becomes even more chaotic) – quite apart from what to do about books published many years after they were written, collected works, etc. I had known that it would take longer to find any book I wanted but I thought this would yield pleasant rambles through my books as I sought a particular volume. In fact it’s just annoying. But I am too lazy to re-organise everything again.

Anyway, an unexpected drawback of scattering slender volumes of modern verse among novels is that you can’t really see them any more. So, when we redecorated my daughter’s bedroom and a small bookcase became surplus to requirements, I stole it for them. It’s right beside the door to the kitchen and already I’m reading more poetry than I’ve done for years. Hurrah!

At the moment I am having a Brontë fest. I reread Jane Eyre – it’s so good! And then I read Glass Town: The Imaginary World of the Brontës by Isabel Greenberg, which was fun and led me back to Juliet Barker’s The Brontës. It was abandoned half-read a couple of years ago but I am now fully absorbed in it. It is too unwieldy for the bus, so I am also rereading Wuthering Heights and loving it all over again.

And now, although I ought to be preparing a four-hour English lesson on answering the telephone and takng a message (four hours! I know! my lucky, lucky students), I will leave you with a quick list of books I’ve read recently that I recommend to you!

• The Absolute Book, by Elizabeth Knox. (Whenever I clap eyes on the spine of this novel, in my head I hear a voice saying ‘The absolute BOOK!’ with exactly the emphasis of a Georgette Heyer heroine gasping ‘You absolute SWINE!’) This is a novel which is always changing, never quite what it seems – characters move through different worlds and we move through different genres. A mash-up of Ruth Rendell, The Shadow of the Wind and Graham Joyce’s Some Kind of Fairy Tale, streaked with darkness and splendidly evocative, it is an enjoyable read slightly let down, I felt, by the neat ending.
• The Trick is to Keep Breathing, by Janice Galloway. I’ve had this book for twenty-five years and finally its moment arrived and it was worth it. In it Joy Stone, a drama teacher, chronicles her struggle with grief and mental breakdown; this sounds grim but it is clever and witty and hopeful as well as sad. I want to read more of her work now.
• The Queen of Air and Darkness, by T.H. White. Darker and crueller than The Sword in the Stone, this is an excoriation of the chivalric code with which Arthur’s court has become associated. White depicts it as either violent or ridiculous and the novel lurches between these two extremes. I found it uncomfortable to read, I think that’s the point. Soon: The Ill-Made Knight.

Happy October, everyone!

 

Take Courage: Anne Brontë and the Art of Life, by Samantha Ellis

A little while ago I started reading Juliet Barker’s The Brontës; in fact I even decided to write about it on here as I read it. Unfortunately, like so many Parry projects, it fell by the wayside. There were two causes for this failure: one was that the Barker book was just too big and heavy to bring on the bus with me, which meant that I had ‘bus reading’ and the Barker, and I can’t really cope with reading more than one book at once so in the end the bus reading conquered the Barker. And then Brexit happened and I was too absorbed in politics – and then suddenly months had passed and I’d lost the momentum. But of course, I felt guilty about it.

However, bus reading or no bus reading I am inspired to pick it up again and this is entirely due to Samantha Ellis’s Take Courage, which is a sort-of biography of Anne Brontë. According to Ellis, Anne is the neglected, forgotten Brontë, usually considered – when considered at all – as mouselike and pious – boring, really. (And I would certainly agree that when people think about the Brontës, they think first and foremost of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.) Ellis herself had always been an Emily devotee, though she also admired Charlotte’s ‘toughness and spirit’. However, on a visit to the Parsonage in Haworth, Ellis reads Anne’s last letter:

‘I long to do some good in the world ... before I leave it. I have many schemes in my head for future practise – humble and limited indeed – but still I should not like them all to come to nothing, and myself to have lived to so little purpose.’ This catches at my heart, and makes me breathe hard suddenly. I put the letter down. This Anne knew what she wanted. She had published two novels and many poems. She didn’t want to have to stop. She was courageous, she was tough, and she wanted more life.

Ellis is transfixed; she connects to Anne emotionally, and begins to suspect that what she had believed about Anne was untrue. So begins her journey to find a more interesting Anne, someone who turns out to be feminist, radical and courageous – not unlike Ellis herself, in fact. Reading Anne’s novels, she realises that they were not only undervalued when they were first published, they are still undervalued now.

Ellis’s first problem is that so little of what Anne wrote remains: two novels, some poems (though many have disappeared), five letters, four diary papers, two of which were co-written with Emily (they had a habit of writing a diary paper every four years, giving an update of their lives; they wrote them together if they could or separately if they were apart) and some marginalia in a few books. Otherwise she has to rely on what others wrote about Anne, and those of Anne’s possessions that still survive. Her solution is clever: she devotes each chapter of her book to one of the people closest to Anne – including the heroines of her two novels – ending with Anne herself. Each person ‘represents’ an aspect of Anne herself – so Maria, her mother, contains her origin story, her attitude towards motherhood and marriage; Tabby, the elderly servant, contains her love of the moors and nature. This approach reminded me of Jacob’s Room, by Virginia Woolf, which creates a frame around the central character by which we learn to know him. I thought this worked really well.

(Sketch of Anne by Charlotte Brontë, ca 1834; found here)

Ellis also eschews any attempt at objectivity or impartiality. This book is driven by her enthusiasm and liking for Anne, which gives it an enormous amount of energy and personality. She speculates fearlessly and, one can’t help feeling, perceptively, on how Anne might have felt or reacted to various situations (‘Anne must have...’ pops up frequently). She tells us about her own life as she researches Anne up in Haworth, visits the places associated with her life, contemplates her own life and new relationship, and she tells us too about her reactions to the material she reads about Anne’s life:

her optimism makes me sigh. I don’t want Anne to be the good girl diligently slogging away. It seems more fun to be Charlotte and Branwell, raging and sneering at their bosses, or Emily, hating employment so much that she mostly avoided it. I don’t want Anne to be excited about setting off for her first job in April 1839 when, at the time, all her siblings were at home and writing like the wind.

In doing this, Ellis takes some risks. One is that she mines Anne’s creative writing, especially her poetry, for Anne’s own opinions. Are her poems on her religious doubts, for instance, really expressions of her own struggles with faith? Might they not be partly or even entirely manipulated by Anne’s artistic skills to create certain effects? To give a doubting reader hope, for instance, rather than articulate her own fears? Or a mixture of both? She extends this to the writings of others: she implicitly suggests that the sisters Rose and Jessy Yorke in Shirley, for instance, are Charlotte and Anne – or how Charlotte perceived their relationship – based on no evidence I could see. I felt that Ellis might be right, but she might not be; I think the role of the imagination in shaping and transmuting biographical facts should never be underestimated and this made me uncomfortable sometimes.

Another risk is that Ellis’s partisanship for Anne, while cheering and necessary, colours her judgement and, for one thing, leads her to resent Charlotte. As I wrote above, I haven’t yet finished the Barker biography so I probably shouldn’t be commenting on this, and from what I have read Charlotte does seem to have been quite a difficult person. However, Ellis does seem to put the worst interpretation on everything Charlotte does. For instance, Ellis believes that Charlotte suppressed Anne’s writing, but perhaps she was trying to protect her reputation (or doing a bit of both?); and it is just possible that in deciding to hold Anne’s funeral without her father, she was right and expecting Patrick to come and bury yet another child would have been too painful to him. It seems to be, in the world of the Brontës, that if you champion one you have to decry the others and that you can only be either/or about them. Ellis first goes to Haworth, after all, to promote her previous book, which pitched Wuthering Heights against Jane Eyre.

Yet taking risks like these creates a lively and affectionate read, through which I zipped in marked contrast to my attempts on Barker’s monumental, scrupulous, scholarly work, and the nice thing about the literary world is that we can enjoy both books and their different strengths. For Ellis’s analysis of Anne’s literary works, especially her novels, is brilliant and rightly reveals their daring, their radicalness and their ‘realness’. In Agnes Grey Anne lifted the lid on life as a governess, showing the ugly reality in which even ‘proper gentry’ behaved badly (this piece of news seems to have shocked the gentry). She also crafted a romance between a man and a woman which was both realistic and based on mutual respect (no glowering Byronic heroes here). The Tenant of Wildfell Hall not only went beyond the ‘marriage plot’ (in which a novel is concerned only with the story leading up to the wedding), it looked unflinchingly and scandalously on alcoholism and a husband’s abuse of his marital rights – and it gives us a feminist heroine who fights for her and her son’s future.

(The dining-room at Haworth Parsonage with – I think – Anne’s writing desk on the table; photograph found here)

AND did you know? because I did not – unless you are reading an edition of Tenant which is based on Stevie Davies’ 1996 edition – or a first or second edition (lucky you) – then you are almost certainly reading a butchered text. !!! Most modern editions are based on a rackety edition published in 1854, years after Anne’s death. The publisher, Thomas Hodgson, wanted to issue the book cheaply, so hacked bits out to make the book fit one volume. This version has become the one most frequently reprinted ever since. Ellis lays a ‘mutilated’ edition beside the Davies edition and is shocked at the difference. Some removals seem to have been purely to cut the page count; others to subtly reduce the radicalness of the original. When I read this I jumped right out of bed and ran to my bookcase to check my own copy: yes, I do have the framing story, but other parts, including Anne’s preface, have been removed. Horrors! I’ll have to buy another book! And I’ll have to buy Agnes Grey, because I’ve never read it. Oh dear. What a painful duty.

In short: if you don’t know much about the Brontës, this strikes me as a great place to start. If you already do know a lot about the Brontës, you will enjoy revisting them in the company of a clever and opinionated friend.

Disclaimer: Samantha Ellis generously donated this book as part of a bundle of her work to be auctioned in the Authors for Grenfell fundraiser; and when I won it she inscribed all the books for me. Of course I only bid on her bundle because I like her work anyway, but it’s always nice to know that an author is a kind person ...