The Poor Governess

CHAPTER ONE
1887

The door opened and a voice said sharply,
“Come along, Miss Lara, it’s a nice day and you should be out getting’ the air instead of bein’ cooped up here scribblin’ your head off!”
The Honourable Lara Hurley raised her face to say laughingly,
“1 am scribbling my head off to some purpose, Nanny, and when I am famous you will be proud of me.”
Nanny, who had been with the family for over twenty years, merely snorted disparagingly and, coming into the room, picked up a scarf that was on one chair, a sun-bonnet on another and several books that had been thrown onto the floor.
Lara sat back in her chair and exclaimed,

Lighten our darkness we beseech Thee, O Lord, and by Thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night. For the love of Thy only Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen.”

The Governess’s lot in the Victorian and Edwardian era was often miserable and frightening as I have described in this novel. My mother always said she was so sorry for them as if they talked they were considered ‘forward’ and if they were silent ‘dull’.
A pretty Governess was also too often considered fair game and I remember hearing a well-known ‘dasher’ of my mother’s generation saying,
“There was a jolly pretty Governess in one house I visited. I was considering seducing her, but thought it unfair. Then, damn me, I learnt that my best friend had got there first!”
Between upstairs and downstairs and often ignored by both, a Governess was lonely and isolated.
But there was no other career open to respectable young women at that time except to be a companion to an old and usually disagreeable Dowager.