Another for McIvor was the art lessons from a white schoolmistress who was an eager tutor.
McIvor's wife, Thelma, says the Woorabinda schoolmistress remains his biggest influence.
Jane leaves him, suffers hardship, and finds work as a village schoolmistress.
In October 1795 he married Sara Fricker, daughter of a local schoolmistress, swayed partly by Southey's suggestion that he was under an obligation to her since she had been refusing the advances of other men.
She was taught at home, then trained in Stockholm as a teacher, and in 1885 went to Landskrona as schoolmistress.
Yet as she greets me in the entrance to the House of Lords, I find them oddly warm, like those of a strict but fair schoolmistress.
In La maestra normal (1914; "The Schoolmistress"), his first and generally considered his best novel, he captures the pettiness and monotony of life in a small Argentinian city before the quickening pace of modernity shattered old provincial ways.
"I have felt a gladiatorial disposition lately," she wrote as a young woman to a schoolmistress.
The otherworldly Alcott neglected to pay her, however, so in 1837 Fuller became a schoolmistress in Providence.
"I'd be offended if you did," she replies, as prim as a village schoolmistress.
(Emma Thompson has a couple of crackling scenes as a formidable, stupid, anti-Semitic schoolmistress).
