Governess: The Lives and Times of the Real Jane Eyres Book

I'm surprised that people found the book dull and repetitive. The only thing dull and repetitive in the book was the lives of many of the women who were forced to work as governesses. The book is certainly painful because one can practically feel the walls closing in the way these women did. It is truly horrifying what some of the family members of these women were capable of doing to them (depriving them of rightful inheritances, etc.) to say nothing of the emotional abuse and neglect of some of the families they worked for.

What Brandon is describing--the awkward social position of the governess--is what some people--borrowing from anthropologists--call "liminality." The women were in an "in between" state--neither truly middle class nor truly working class. It left them without a clear social group and hence often desperately lonely. Liminal people provoke anxiety in others who don't know how to classify them and therefore how to interact with them. How could other, more well-off, women not see a possible future in the face of their children's governess (only a bankruptcy away)? If they pushed these women away physically and emotionally, made them even more alien, perhaps it was out of an unconscious desire to push that very possibility out of their own minds.