THE GOVERNESS DEBATES

Given its central focus on the governess figure, Agnes Grey is necessarily implicated in larger contemporary debates concerning the problems of governessing. These debates were not only conducted within the magazines and journals which circulated at the time, but were also, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, rehearsed within the context of increasingly popular governess novels. Brontë's own governess's tale represents one of the first of the many texts which detail the conditions in which growing numbers of middle-class Victorian women laboured. For some commentators, the nineteenth-century concern for the plight of the governess ‘seems somewhat excessive’, particularly when one considers the high incidence of women employed in domestic service or in industry. Yet the attention afforded to the governess not only signals a middle-class bias on the part of philanthropists and social commentators but is also symptomatic of the multiple anxieties – relating to class, work, education and gender – to which her existence gives rise.

The fact that middle-class, educated women found themselves in need of paid employment signalled the economic instability of their class, which later historians in part ascribe to the increasing numbers of single eligible men who sought their fortunes in the colonies. Given a social and cultural milieu in which female confinement in the home was seen to be a sign of success, employment as a governess placed the daughters of the financially stricken middle classes in a compromising as well as compromised position, even as paid work within the home – albeit the home of another – was seen to be less invidious than other forms of employment. It enabled the governess to retain her connections with her own class and to carry out duties which in other circumstances she might have performed for her own children.