THE GOVERNESS: Fact and Fancy with Valerie Krips

Of all the figures associated with children in Georgian and Regency England, few carry more complex associations than the Governess. By turns too strict or too lenient (and even bawdy) her figure appears again and again in the literature of the period, and in the history of childhood of the time.

This talk discusses her role in education, and also her more ambivalent role as a figure of imagination. Her status, in between the gentry she served and the servants who served them, and her role as stand-in for the parent provide, as we shall see, a rich canvas for contemporary imagination.

Dr Valerie Krips is Associate Professor Emerita of the English Department of the University of Pittsburgh, and Honorary Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of The Presence of the Past: Memory, History and Childhood in Postwar Britain, she is completing a book on cultural memory.