GOVERNESSES IN FICTION.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXIX, Issue 3769, 25 July 1907, Page 3

GOVERNESSES IN FICTION.

According to a New York paper, says the Daily Graphic, a serious change is threatening in the social station of novelists’ heroines. Governesses, it says, have been done to death by the masters of 'fiction, and their place will have to be taken by some other class of young lady. It is not easy to single out many “masters of fiction ” who have been guilty of thus over-working governesses. Jane Eyre was a governess, but other examples are not easy to remember. It depends, perhaps, on the standard by which one judges fiction writes. There is. of course, a class of novel in which the governess is very popular as heroine, and here, no doubt, a change might de desirable. The governess in this class always does the same thing.

In Chapter I. she is usually the victim of a financial crash. One does not feel very sorry for her, because, immediately one learns that the brave girl is going out into the world to seek her fortune as a governess, one knows that it will be all right in the end. By Chapter HI. she has usually taken service in the wretchedly ill-man-nered familj' of an earl. Everbody lays him or herself out to make the brave girl feel her position of dependence as acutely as possible ; but again one is not undulj’ moved. By Chapter V. at latest the young heir usually arrives, and one knows that on page 250 she will slip her slim, cool hand into his, and, gazing out over the fair prospect, will ask him if he remembers, how, on that first day, he found her weeping in the summer-house.