‘A Lady with a Profession’: The Governess, the Invalid, and the Woman Question in the Novels of Charlotte M. Yonge

Walker Gore, Clare (2022). ‘A Lady with a Profession’: The Governess, the Invalid, and the Woman Question in the Novels of Charlotte M. Yonge. In: Walker Gore, Clare; Schultze, Clemence and Courtney, Julia eds. Charlotte Mary Yonge: Writing the Victorian Age. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, pp. 85–103.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10672-9_5

Abstract

This chapter traces the relationship between the figures of the governess and the invalid in a trio of Charlotte Yonge’s domestic realist novels. In the mid-Victorian period, as debate raged about whether women were physically strong enough for the rigours of secondary and higher education, and whether professionalism was compatible with femininity, the governess and the invalid acted as archetypes which enabled writers to explore particularly charged aspects of the contentious ‘Woman Question’. In The Daisy Chain (1856), Hopes and Fears (1860), and The Clever Woman of the Family (1865), Yonge brings these figures together in a series of intriguing pairings which test the limits of professionalism and question the proper scope of girls’ education and women’s work.

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