Women Outside the Structure: Victorian Widows and Governesses

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When we think of Victorian Britain, certain images come to mind: men with top hats and pocket watches, women in crinolines and bonnets, new railways and industry, tea drinking and calling cards. We picture a world that is ordered, strict and rigid – a social system set in stone and bound by rules of propriety and decorum. And when we think of Victorian governesses, we imagine meek young women in grey dresses teaching lessons in attic rooms. When we think of Victorian widows, we imagine Queen Victoria herself, dressing sombrely in black for the rest of her life after Prince Albert’s death.

But in fact, for the Victorians, both governesses and widows could be dangerous women.

Victorian society saw marriage and housewifery as the end goal in life for women; in the minds of many, man’s role was in the outside world and woman’s in the home. John Ruskin, in Sesame and Lilies, declares: ‘The man’s power is active, progressive, defensive . . . The man, in his rough work in the open world, must encounter all peril and trial . . . But he guards the woman from all this; within his house, as ruled by her, unless she herself has sought it, need enter no danger, no temptation.’ Coventry Patmore’s poem, The Angel in the House, contains line such as: ‘Man must be pleased; but him to please / is woman’s pleasure’. This was a society where women were meant to be wives, or effectively pre-wives, waiting to be married. Before having a husband, women were supposed to be waiting for one. A conduct book from the 1840s declares: ‘The great end and aim of almost every young female is to be united in marriage to a deserving man’; another book adds: ‘Men have various objects of ambition – women have only one, and that one is marriage.’

But of course, most people’s lived experiences did not fit neatly into these ‘ideals’. Victorian society as a whole was more mobile and complicated than we often think – and indeed than many Victorians wanted it to be. Society changed hugely over the period, and there were always people who did not fit into the system. Many women did not marry. Many women married, then lost their husbands. Many women, both married and unmarried, worked away from the home. The ‘angel in the house’ was a middle-class preoccupation, based on a household having sufficient income that only one person need work. Those who set out the ‘ideals’ of the time, being chiefly middle- and upper-class men, could just about make their peace with working-class women working, but the idea of middle-class women working unnerved them. And what was the go-to role for a middle-class woman who needed to work? The governess, of course.

Ever since I started reading Victorian literature and reading about Victorian history as a teenager, I’ve been fascinated by the people who didn’t fit in to the social structures of the time. In my debut novel, The Secrets of Hartwood Hall, I wanted to explore the position of women in the Victorian period and to focus on women who didn’t quite fit in. When creating the character of Margaret, the novel’s protagonist, I gave her two roles that place her in an ambiguous social position. Like the heroines of several Victorian novels, she is a governess. Unlike the heroines of most Victorian novels, she is also a widow.

Governesses were respectable members of the Victorian social order, present in many middle- and upper-class households, but society didn’t quite know how to classify them. The conduct books for governesses from the period contain many rules – everything from not reading ‘exciting’ novels to dressing as plainly as possible. And within these books, there is a continued focus on maintaining distance from both the servants and the family of the house. A governess was neither one of the servants nor one of the masters. She was removed by financial circumstances from her employer and by education from the rest of the household. She had to be a lady in education and manners but an employee in status. Governesses were unmarried, educated women earning money and building what could be a long career by their own intelligence. They were both in paid employment but also regularly brought into contact with respectable gentlemen whom (God forbid!) they might marry. All of this made the Victorians anxious. In Jane Eyre, Lady Ingram declares: ‘Don’t mention governesses; the word makes me nervous.’

Victorian literature is full of governesses. Sometimes they are scheming to marry gentlemen far above themselves, as in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair or Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. Sometimes they are downtrodden women struggling with difficult positions, as in Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey or Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit. Sometimes they become one of the family, living almost on terms of equality with their masters and mistresses, as to a certain extent in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre or Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds. Sometimes they are downright villainous, as in J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas. The Victorians kept writing books about governesses, because they didn’t know what to make of them.

I wanted to explore the ambiguities of being a governess through Margaret in The Secrets of Hartwood Hall. She forms a kind of friendship with the mistress of the house, Mrs Eversham, but she is also very much in her power, always anxious about offending her. Like many governesses of the time, she has nowhere to go if she loses her job. Simultaneously, her relationship with the servants is ambiguous. As she begins a friendship, and later more, with the gardener, Paul, Margaret is aware that this crosses all kinds of social lines, that she is breaking every rule.

However, Margaret has one very significant difference from the heroines of Victorian governess novels. She is not an unmarried woman in her late teens or early twenties; she is twenty-nine years old, and she is a widow. She was a governess in her youth, left a difficult position to marry – and now, three years later, her husband is dead, and she returns to work as a governess. She is aware that the very fact of her being a widow may be a mark against her with potential employers.

In a society that thought of women as wives and pre-wives, widows were a problem. They were post-wives, women who had been but were no longer wives. Widows were more financially and socially independent than either married or unmarried women; they were single and respectable but also sexually experienced – and Victorian society couldn’t make its peace with a woman being all of these things.

Widows are rarely the heroines of Victorian novels, although there are notable exceptions, such as Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers or Thomas Hardy’s The Hand of Ethelberta. There is a reason why Toby Weller tells his son, in The Pickwick Papers, to ‘be wery careful o’ widders all your life’. Later, Toby Weller is overrun with widows trying to marry him and declares ‘I ain’t safe’. Mr Weller’s fear of widows is a joke, but the joke worked for Charles Dickens’s audience because they got the subtext: that a sexually experienced, financially independent widow would be much more likely to tempt Toby Weller into another marriage than a woman who had never been married before.

Only a relatively small percentage of widows remarried in mid-19th century Britain, but from their portrayal in literature, you would think otherwise. Widowed women seeking artfully to persuade men into matrimony are aplenty in Victorian novels, from the titular character in The Widow Barnaby by Frances Trollope to Mrs MacStinger in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son. Hyacinth Kirkpatrick in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters is a complex character, but she, too, fits into this type, and even the heroine of Thomas Hardy’s The Hand of Ethelberta is hardly free from artfulness in considering her future marital prospects.

I made Margaret in The Secrets of Hartwood Hall a widow partly because I wanted to explore the complexities and power dynamics of Victorian marriage through a character who had recently come out of it, and partly because I wanted to examine Victorian widowhood: the independence and sense of guilt it brings Margaret, the difference it makes in her relationship with Paul; the strange shape it has given her life. Through her, I wanted to examine both what it meant to be a wife and what it meant to be a widow at this point in time – and what it meant to feel that you did not really fit into either role.

Like many real women of the Victorian period, Margaret struggles to behave as society expects her to. As a governess and widow, she is already half outside of the structure – and she starts to wonder what kind of life she could have if she simply left it all behind.

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