When Charlotte Brontë, aged 23, said farewell to the ‘burning clime’ of Angria which had fed her imagination for so many years, the alternative before her was indeed ‘cool’, ‘sober’ and ‘subdued’ (A. 314): it was to go once again as a governess. Writing two years later to Ellen Nussey from a post with the White family at Upperwood House, near Bradford, she laments that

Charlotte's own character – shy, proud and not easily drawn to children – was certainly not suited to the part of governess, but some of her distress was inherent in the role itself, and derived from what modern sociologists call ‘status incongruence’ in a society much more rigidly controlled than ours in class terms. The Victorian writer Elizabeth Sewell explains that ‘the real discomfort of a governess's position in a private family arises from the fact that it is undefined. She is not a relation, not a guest, not a mistress, not a servant – but something made up of all. No one knows exactly how to treat her’. Elizabeth Rigby (later Lady Eastlake), writes from the employer's perspective: ‘the real definition of a governess, in the English sense, is a being who is our equal in birth, manners, and education, but our inferior in worldly wealth. Take a lady, in every meaning of the word, born and bred, and let her father pass through the gazette [bankruptcy], and she wants nothing more to suit our highest beau idéal of a guide and instructress to our children’. The result, as Rigby succinctly puts it, is that ‘there is no other class which so cruelly requires its members to be, in birth, mind, and manners, above their station, in order to fit them for their station’.