For many of us, the figure of the governess haunts our imagination from reading writers like Jane Austen, any of the Brontes, Louisa May Alcott, Wilkie Collins and Henry James. These were women who occupied a strange in-between state, being neither servants nor family members. For over a century, the only recourse for a certain kind of young lady without means or dowry was to live in someone else's household and to educate someone else's children -- most especially their daughters. Since so many of these women were educated, articulate and away from home, they left a trail of letters, journals and literary productions which will enable Ruth to tell their stories. Some of the governesses here are well known; thus, we start with Mary Wollstencraft, whose own misery when she was a governess echoes down the century and whose ideas were eventually to bring about the end of governesses and the rise of women's education. Included also are Claire Clairmont, daughter of William Godwin's second wife, the Brontes and Anna Leonowens (THE KING AND I was based on her story) as well as lesser known women such as Nelly Weeton, Agnes Porter and Anna Jameson. Most of them were intelligent women marooned in the dreary waste of other people's lives, often with marriage to the local curate the most likely means of escape. it was only with the inception of the Governesses' Benevolent Institution for the purposes of 'raising the condition of the very useful class of persons called governesses' and later the activities of the so-called Langham Place group that things were finally to begin to change.

The GBI founded Queen's College in Harley Street, the first real secondary school for girls, which led in time to Girton College, Cambridge, the first women's college.