REREAD: The Governess
Mar. 1st, 2019 06:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllThe Governess: Peggy Chambers, Peacock 1964
This wasn’t the book that I thought it was when I put it on my ‘to reread’ pile. In and of itself, that says something about how memorable I found it, some 20 years on after buying it.
In a way, it reminded me of those 1950s career books for girls. It could have been called ‘Isabel Dennison – Governess’. But those books were about 20th century jobs and careers opening up for girls. This is set in the Victorian era when the options for impoverished, respectable gentlewomen were few. I don’t know whether I was overly influenced by the publishers’ description on the very first page, but it’s as if the author decided, before starting to write the book, ‘You liked Jane Eyre, well, here is what it was really like for a Victorian governess.’
My first impression of ‘The Governess’ after reading a few pages while waiting for a bus was that it was too descriptive. We spent a lot of time walking along with Isabel Dennison, on her way to her second engagement as a governess, armed with a good reference and wondering why the previous governess was dismissed. By the time she and we meet her employer and charges, I’d realised that Chambers had a turn for the didactic. She does not wear her research lightly. At times, Isabel is granted an omniscient sweep of knowledge about the pay and conditions of the governess that I didn’t buy.
I preferred the book when the narrative wasn’t interrupted for us to be informed of what was going on with the Royal Family, or elsewhere in the big wide world. When we focused on the doings of the Staveleys – Isabel’s charges – I was reminded of books by E. Everett-Green et al. for she’s initially in charge of five girls. There are two living brothers and two dead.
Marion, Laura, Elizabeth, Caroline and Anne, not to mention Peter and Hugh and their parents, all have different characters and dispositions. So, her students pose their governess different challenges, while their parents have differing views on what girls should be taught. Well-educated Miss Dennison is eager to develop the privileged Staveleys’ minds and social consciences. Going back to the comparison with turn of the century girls own, the book lacks a spiritual dimension. Church is somewhere you go at Christmas and for weddings. When death comes to Prince Albert and central characters, there is only the grim need to go on living.
Marion, the eldest daughter, and least influenced by ‘Denny’, pleases her mother’s social ambition and marries ‘well’, but the other children either marry less well in terms of status, but better in terms of their happiness, or choose careers. This includes the daughters, to Mrs Staveley’s incomprehension and dismay. Worse, because of Mrs Staveley’s own nature and behaviour in the past, it is to Denny they turn when in trouble.
Denny herself has an almost romance, for she’s only 20 at the start of the book, which takes us from the 1850s to the 1860s. She longs to be the one who comes first, for once – I detected some ‘Villette’ in here too. This book is really too uneven, and you might as well read Brontë’s novels and non-fiction about governesses and opportunities for young women.
Peacock Books seems to have been a Penguin imprint for what we’d now call young adult books, though they didn’t last like Puffin.
Number of books reread during February: four and a half.
[Lightly edited on 9 November 2019.#
This wasn’t the book that I thought it was when I put it on my ‘to reread’ pile. In and of itself, that says something about how memorable I found it, some 20 years on after buying it.
In a way, it reminded me of those 1950s career books for girls. It could have been called ‘Isabel Dennison – Governess’. But those books were about 20th century jobs and careers opening up for girls. This is set in the Victorian era when the options for impoverished, respectable gentlewomen were few. I don’t know whether I was overly influenced by the publishers’ description on the very first page, but it’s as if the author decided, before starting to write the book, ‘You liked Jane Eyre, well, here is what it was really like for a Victorian governess.’
My first impression of ‘The Governess’ after reading a few pages while waiting for a bus was that it was too descriptive. We spent a lot of time walking along with Isabel Dennison, on her way to her second engagement as a governess, armed with a good reference and wondering why the previous governess was dismissed. By the time she and we meet her employer and charges, I’d realised that Chambers had a turn for the didactic. She does not wear her research lightly. At times, Isabel is granted an omniscient sweep of knowledge about the pay and conditions of the governess that I didn’t buy.
I preferred the book when the narrative wasn’t interrupted for us to be informed of what was going on with the Royal Family, or elsewhere in the big wide world. When we focused on the doings of the Staveleys – Isabel’s charges – I was reminded of books by E. Everett-Green et al. for she’s initially in charge of five girls. There are two living brothers and two dead.
Marion, Laura, Elizabeth, Caroline and Anne, not to mention Peter and Hugh and their parents, all have different characters and dispositions. So, her students pose their governess different challenges, while their parents have differing views on what girls should be taught. Well-educated Miss Dennison is eager to develop the privileged Staveleys’ minds and social consciences. Going back to the comparison with turn of the century girls own, the book lacks a spiritual dimension. Church is somewhere you go at Christmas and for weddings. When death comes to Prince Albert and central characters, there is only the grim need to go on living.
Marion, the eldest daughter, and least influenced by ‘Denny’, pleases her mother’s social ambition and marries ‘well’, but the other children either marry less well in terms of status, but better in terms of their happiness, or choose careers. This includes the daughters, to Mrs Staveley’s incomprehension and dismay. Worse, because of Mrs Staveley’s own nature and behaviour in the past, it is to Denny they turn when in trouble.
Denny herself has an almost romance, for she’s only 20 at the start of the book, which takes us from the 1850s to the 1860s. She longs to be the one who comes first, for once – I detected some ‘Villette’ in here too. This book is really too uneven, and you might as well read Brontë’s novels and non-fiction about governesses and opportunities for young women.
Peacock Books seems to have been a Penguin imprint for what we’d now call young adult books, though they didn’t last like Puffin.
Number of books reread during February: four and a half.
[Lightly edited on 9 November 2019.#
