When Mr. Tryan arrives in Milby, with his disturbingly evangelical and puritan tendencies, the small town is deeply divided in a bitter fight over the suitability of his evening lectures. The proud but desolate Janet Dempster, alcoholic wife of one of Mr. Tryan’s most vociferous opponents, delights in the clergyman’s persecution—until she unexpectedly finds her own redemption. Written when she was on the brink of her career as a novelist, Janet's Repentance foreshadows the themes of Eliot’s later work.

A portrait of the life and times of the domestic diva of Victorian England profiles Isabella Beeton, the woman behind Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management, a period collection of recipes and domestic advice, and explores the remarkable legacy of the volume. Reprint.

The figure of the governess is very familiar from nineteenth-century literature. Much less is known about the governess in reality. This book is the first rounded exploration of what the life of the home schoolroom was actually like. Drawing on original diaries and a variety of previously undiscovered sources, Kathryn Hughes describes why the period 1840-80 was the classic age of governesses. She examines their numbers, recruitment, teaching methods, social position and prospects.The governess provides a key to the central Victorian concept of the lady. Her education consisted of a series of accomplishments designed to attract a husband able to keep her in the style to which she had become accustomed from birth. Becoming a governess was the only acceptable way of earning money open to a lady whose family could not support her in leisure.Being paid to educate another woman's children set in play a series of social and emotional tensions. The governess was a surrogate mother, who was herself childless, a young woman whose marriage prospects were restricted, and a family member who was sometimes mistaken for a servant. (view table of contents)

An accessible, illustrated study of the great Victorian novelist details the personal dramas that shaped her work, including her adulterous affair with writer George Henry Lewes, and relates her life to the issues of her day. Reprint. (view table of contents)

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