Unfortunate spinsters down under
Margaret FitzHerbert
THE GOVERNESSES by Patricia Clarke
Hutchinson, £12.95
For those who sometimes lie awake in the small hours of the night, feeling a little at odds with their lives, a trifle dissatisfied with their lot, not wholly certain that the cards dealt to them constituted a hand or totally convinced that the game was fair, The Governesses is the ideal bedside book. Not only will this book induce sleep in the most hardened insomniac (for although fascinating it is also astonishingly boring), but it will bring such a feeling of well being and of privilege to the reader that all self-pity will be banished.
The subjects of this book, English middle-class spinsters of straightened means in the 1860s and 1870s, were the victims of an opinionated, self-willed Victorian do-gooder named Maria S. Rye. She was the eldest of nine children of a London solicitor, and though middle-class and a spinster, was not herself impover- ished. Out of a philanthropic feeling for those less fortunate or, one suspects, out of sheer meddlesomeness, she founded the Female Middle Class Emigration Society (FMCES). The aim of the society was to assist, by means of loans repayable in two years, educated women to travel to the colonies in search of employment as gov-
ernesses. The fare to Australia, where the majority of governesses emigrated, was usually about £25 second class, and the average salary for those that found work was £50 per annum. Many failed to find employment altogether, some spent an- xious months in cheap lodgings while their tiny borrowed capital dwindled. Even those who were lucky and found immedi- ate work fretted about their debt. The letters that they wrote home to the Society, mostly asking for more time to pay, are the back-bone of the book.
Nearly all the letters stressed the paucity of the job. Miss Rye paid no heed. The colonial governments and the official agen- cies for emigration also discouraged the scheme but Miss Rye thought she knew better. With the support (which was never translated into action) of the Anglican Bishop of Sydney, she blithely packed off these poor genteel ladies to the uncouth rigours of the Australian outback. The FMCES sent about 302 women to the colonies in the 20 years of its operations. It is a dismal tale with few exceptions.
The most eloquent governess was Rosa Phayne — 'with no feeling of actual home- sickness do I write, only weary disappoint-
ment' — but she was blunt. 'I do not use too strong a language when I say no one
with the tastes, habits and feelings of a lady should ever come out to Australia.' And she was blunter still in giving her unwel- come and unheeded comment: 'There has not been one Governess to whom I have spoken but has not, like me, deeply regret- ted coming out and who would not return to England could they afford it.' Rosa Phayne was one of the few who escaped. Although it was never admitted openly, many of the young women who emigrated under the FMCES umbrella were in search of husbands as much as jobs. In this area, too, few were successful. They were hin- dered by their snobbishness and possibly by their plainness. There are no physical descriptions of the governesses but some- how through their prose one can detect that most of them were plain women. Certainly they were jealous and bitchy. Of Miss Mounsden, who found a husband among the gentlemen passengers on the boat, Miss Streeter would only say 'I have
never seen her since we landed and never wish to see that lady again.' Miss Richard- son was more outspoken on the subject of Miss Pool, who had the misfortune to be Irish and a Roman Catholic.
We were so thoroughly disgusted with her that we determined as soon as ever we left the ship never if possible to come in contact with her again. Her conduct on board the ship was such as I think you could not believe without having witnessed it . . at last we were obliged to make a formal complaint. I wrote a note to the Captain requesting a private interview, which was immediately granted. The result was she was turned out of our Cabin and put into a kind of little closet by herself where she was eventually locked up for misconduct. She was threatened with irons several times.
The misconduct of Miss Pool comes as light relief in the second chapter devoted to the 'Voyage out'. It is an immensely tedious chapter. The weather, variations in rough and fair, is repetitively described in innumerable quotations. In fact, with the exception of Rosa Phayne, the governesses seldom write well. Patricia Clarke, on the other hand, does write well and her re- search is impressive. It is a pity that she has been able to unearth so little about the subsequent lives of her subjects. She has made the most of her material but few of her characters come alive. Many remain simply as numbers in the FMCES records, like No.66 who emigrated in 1863 and is remembered thus: `Went out to a situation, lost it and married beneath her'. One longs to know more.
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