Reprint of the original, first published in 1872.

The figure of the governess is very familiar from nineteenth-century literature. Much less is known about the governess in reality. This book is the first rounded exploration of what the life of the home schoolroom was actually like. Drawing on original diaries and a variety of previously undiscovered sources, Kathryn Hughes describes why the period 1840-80 was the classic age of governesses. She examines their numbers, recruitment, teaching methods, social position and prospects. The governess provides a key to the central Victorian concept of the lady. Her education consisted of a series of accomplishments designed to attract a husband able to keep her in the style to which she had become accustomed from birth. Becoming a governess was the only acceptable way of earning money open to a lady whose family could not support her in leisure. Being paid to educate another woman's children set in play a series of social and emotional tensions. The governess was a surrogate mother, who was herself childless, a young woman whose marriage prospects were restricted, and a family member who was sometimes mistaken for a servant.

A brutal murder of a child in a small English village in 1860 which remained an unsolved crime until the sensational confession of Constance Emilie Kent in 1865. If you are a true crime enthusiast, if you wonder about what happens to a woman, a human being, after they confess, are tried and then imprisoned for twenty years you will enjoy Noeline Kyle's tracing of Constance Kent's extraordinary life before, during and after this awful crime. Constance Kent trained as a nurse at the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, worked at the Coast Hospital at Little Bay, was matron of the notorious Parramatta Industrial School for girls and matron of a nurses' home in Maitland, she was a convicted murderess but lived to the grand old age of 100 under an assumed name and not once did anyone in the Antipodes suspect her true identity.