Gilded Age Deep Dive: The British Governesses Behind America’s Daughters
The British are coming… and they’re bringing deportment.
If you caught last week’s article on Edith Wharton, trail-blazing Gilded Age author and the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, you’ll know I’ve got Buccaneers fever this month. I’ll be publishing pieces throughout April celebrating the last, yet sadly incomplete, novel Wharton ever wrote – and this week, we’re exploring the phenomenon of British governesses in elite US households.
Enter: Laura Testvalley. One of the novel’s central characters, she is composed, observant, and unmistakably English. Highly educated in languages, the arts, and all things deportment, she offers something altogether different from the world of ambition and exuberance dominating Madison Avenue and Newport’s salons.
She may be a fictional creation, but she is far from imagined. Women like her occupied a very real and very curious position within Gilded Age society, particularly in the homes of wealthy American families eager to secure not just fortune, but legitimacy.
Because, as we know, it wasn’t enough to be filthy rich in the nineteenth century; one had to be refined. And refinement, as many American families believed, was something that could be bought…
