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)

the perils of updating classics: Sense & Sensibility and Northanger Abbey

(Illustration from A Memoir of Jane Austen, 1870)

The Austen Project – instigated presumably by HarperCollins, who are publishing its fruits – has commissioned six well-known authors to provide ‘new’ versions of Jane Austen’s novels. Joanna Trollope, Val McDermid, Alexander McCall Smith and Curtis Sittenfield have tackled Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, Emma and Pride and Prejudice; the others have not yet been issued. I read Trollope’s Sense & Sensibility a few years ago and have just finished McDermid’s Northanger Abbey and I have to admit I am underwhelmed by both. Not that Trollope and McDermid are poor writers or that the books are not enjoyable, but that their works act as perfect examples of the dangers of updating older novels.

Whether by instruction or choice, both writers have stuck quite closely to the original plot and characters and while they have done their best, the jarring notes this approach produces just highlights how much society has changed in two hundred years. Elinor, Marianne and Catherine are teenagers in these modern versions as well as in the originals, and I struggled to believe that middle-class parents these days would jump for joy at the prospect of their seventeen-year-old daughter getting engaged. The authors also felt constrained to have their characters meet each other face to face, as would have been necessary in Austen’s time, when nowadays surely the telephone would have been employed (a particularly egregious example is Henry Tilney’s panicked overnight drive down to see Cat after he discovers that she’s been thrown out of his father’s house; if you were truly worried that someone had not got home safely why wouldn’t you phone, text or email them first?).

For me, Trollope’s novel worked less well than McDermid’s. Trollope’s characters never struck me as much like modern teenagers – at least McDermid’s Cat Morland made liberal use of her mobile: Trollope was a bit vague about social media – and oddly didn’t seem to have any friends. Elinor is forced to quit her degree in architecture in London because the family are moving to the West Country to downsize. It’s as if student grants and student digs don’t exist, and it’s only at the end of the novel that the family discovers there are universities outside London anyway. While Trollope always writes fluently, her retelling lacked Austen’s sharpness and, far from commenting acutely on modern manners, which might be in the spirit of Austen, she describes a class so upper-upper-middle and so divorced from mainstream society that it was difficult to believe it existed or have much patience with the perceived travails of its characters. However, I did think that Trollope did an extremely good job with Mrs Dashwood, who was convincingly impractical, vague and self-indulgent.

Despite being disappointed with Sense and Sensibility, I had high hopes of Northanger Abbey and overall I felt that this version worked better. McDermid cleverly substitutes Edinburgh during the Festival for Bath during the Season, and this works very well. She also, as Austen did, uses her book to poke sly fun at fiction, in this case literary snobbery, although again she shies away from much social commentary. But like Trollope, where McDermid follows Austen too closely, things go awry. The most marked instance of this is Cat’s love of vampire fiction, and her growing concern that the Tilneys are vampires. McDermid failed utterly to convince me that any seventeen-year-old girl could possibly believe that vampires really exist. It might have worked better had she substituted crime fiction for gothic horror and have Cat fancy General Tilney a serial killer, but even so she would have needed to work harder to build up Cat’s delusion so that the reader could understand if not necessarily share it.

If you are in need of a pleasant and undemanding read, then both of these novels are fine. But what they showed to me is that it’s better to be freer with your material than either Trollope or McDermid felt they could be. Longbourn by Jo Baker, Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding (not the film!) and Bride and Prejudice are all more successful works; they don’t seek merely to replicate but to winkle out aspects of Pride and Prejudice that can be used in interesting ways to create something similar but fresh.

Do you know of any good Austen adaptations?