Greene is good on her extraordinary lifelong loyalty to her one-time governess Helen Rootham, and tries hard to see what kept her coming back to Tchelitchew when he ignored or insulted her again and again.
Such quirky thinking, not to mention the notion of defining and playing with time, informs "The Night Governess," which is a model of whimsy controlled.
At that time, in 1841, a governess to the White family in Rawdon, Yorkshire, she confides her discontent with indulged children to this dull clergyman who, she knew, understood her not at all.
And Lady Sophy, the stern English guardian of Paramount's two younger daughters, might resemble Anna Leonowens, who was known then for her time spent as a governess in the royal court of Siam, which inspired "The King and I".
The highlight of this British period came the same year when she again played a governess - this time in Jack Clayton's version of Henry James Thee Turn of the Screw.
The highlight of this British period came the same year when she again played a governess - this time in Jack Clayton's version of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw.
Published in 1847, Anne Brontë's first novel has a documentary quality, being based on her experiences of working as a governess (at the time the only respectable occupation available to unmarried women of reduced circumstances).
And so we got a new strain of the crossword, suitable for Top People who had, in the words of former Times nabob Richard Browne, "graduated from governess to public school to Oxford and Cambridge", whose intelligence could not be insulted by anything so simple as a game based on mere definitions.
Early in 1850 Liszt had been disturbed to learn that Blandine and Cosima were seeing their mother again; his response, guided by the princess, was to remove them from their school and place them into the full-time care of Carolyne's old governess, the 72-year-old Madame Patersi de Fossombroni.
For a time the royal household employed an English governess, Anna Leonowens, whose published reminiscences made Mongkut the model for the king in a 20th-century musical comedy, The King and I.
Wuthering Heights comprised two volumes of the standard tripledecker format of the time, while Anne's tale of a governess, based on her own experiences of teaching variously appalling children in rich houses, made up the third.
