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The Victorian Governess, by Kathryn Hughes; pp. xvi + 256. London and Rio Grande, OH: Hambledon Press, 1993, $40.00, L25.00.
The Victorian Governess is a readable, intelligent, well-researched study of resident home teachers during the nineteenth century. The governess is so familiar to us--both as a character in fiction and from memoirs and biographies--that one would have thought a book like this already existed. Most volumes on governesses, however, are quasi-popular histories with a lot of quotation but not much analysis, while recent bibliographies turn up several dissertations on governess novels and a lot of essays about Henry James.
Kathryn Hughes has drawn on all of these sources and on advice manuals, articles in a wide range of periodicals, reports of the Governesses' Benevolent Institution, census returns, and recent works of social history. She also gleaned some recollections of home education from elderly listeners to the BBC and gained access to family-held letters and diaries. Furthermore, as her incisive prefatory cautions reveal, she interrogates all sources to ask how the writer's motives and audience may have shaped the information.
I was especially impressed by Hughes's creative use of selected census documents to figure out who actually used governesses and her careful exploration of...