‘Very fond of Shirley: I both like and admire her; but I am painfully circumstanced; for a reason I cannot explain, I want to go away from this place, and to forget it.’
‘You told me before you wished to be a governess; but, my dear, if you remember, I did not encourage the idea. I have been a governess myself great part of my life. In Miss Keeldar’s acquaintance I esteem myself most fortunate; her talents and her really sweet disposition have rendered my office easy to me; but when I was young, before I married, my trials were severe, poignant. I should not like a—I should not like you to endure similar ones. It was my lot to enter a family of considerable pretensions to good birth and mental superiority, and the members of which also believed that “on them was perceptible” an unusual endowment of the “Christian graces”; that all their hearts were regenerate, and their spirits in a peculiar state of discipline. I was early given to understand that “as I was not their equal,” so I could not expect “to have their sympathy.” It was in no sort concealed from me that I was held a “burden and a restraint in society.” The gentlemen, I found, regarded me as a “tabooed woman,” to whom “they were interdicted from granting the usual privileges of the sex,” and yet who “annoyed them by frequently crossing their path.” The ladies, too, made it plain that they thought me “a bore.” The servants, it was signified, “detested me”; why, I could never clearly comprehend. My pupils, I was told, “however much they might love me, and how deep soever the interest I might take in them, could not be my friends.” It was intimated that I “must live alone, and never transgress the invisible but rigid line which established the difference between me and my employers.” My life in this house was sedentary, solitary, constrained, joyless, toilsome. The dreadful crushing of the animal spirits, the ever prevailing sense of friendlessness and homelessness consequent on this state of things, began ere long to produce mortal effects on my constitution—I sickened. The lady of the house told me coolly I was the victim of “wounded vanity.” She hinted that if I did not make an effort to quell my “ungodly discontent,” to cease “murmuring against God’s appointment,” and to cultivate the profound humility befitting my station, my mind would very likely “go to pieces” on the rock that wrecked most of my sisterhood—morbid self-esteem—and that I should die an inmate of a lunatic asylum.
‘I said nothing to Mrs. Hardman; it would have been useless; but to her eldest daughter I one day dropped a few observations, which were answered thus: There were hardships, she allowed, in the position of a governess: “doubtless they had their trials; but,” she averred, with a manner it makes me smile now to recall—“but it must be so. She” (Miss H.) “had neither view, hope, nor wish to see these things remedied; for in the inherent constitution of English habits, feelings, and prejudices, there was no possibility that they should be. Governesses,” she observed, “must ever be kept in a sort of isolation: it is the only means of maintaining that distance which the reserve of English manners and the decorum of English families exact.”
‘I remember I sighed as Miss Hardman quitted my bedside: she caught the sound, and, turning, said severely: “I fear, Miss Gray, you have inherited in fullest measure the worst sin of our fallen nature—the sin of pride. You are proud, and therefore you are ungrateful, too. Mamma pays you a handsome salary; and, if you had average sense, you would thankfully put up with much that is fatiguing to do and irksome to bear, since it is so well made worth your while.”
‘Miss Hardman, my love, was a very strong-minded young lady, of most distinguished talents: the aristocracy are decidedly a very superior class, you know—both physically, and morally, and mentally—as a high Tory I acknowledge that; I could not describe the dignity of her voice and mien as she addressed me thus; still, I fear she was selfish, my dear. I would never wish to speak ill of my superiors in rank, but I think she was a little selfish.
‘I remember,’ continued Mrs. Pryor, after a pause, ‘another of Miss H.’s observations, which she would utter with quite a grand air. “WE,” she would say—“WE need the imprudences, extravagances, mistakes, and crimes of a certain number of fathers to sow the seed from which WE reap the harvest of governesses. The daughters of tradespeople, however well-educated, must necessarily be underbred, and as such unfit to be inmates of OUR dwellings or guardians of OUR children’s minds and persons. WE shall ever