The governess, whose name is never revealed, is the first-person narrator of the novella’s main story. The details of her life prior to her role as governess at Bly are largely provided in the Prologue to her story, by a character named Douglas. He became good friends with the governess when he was a university student, and she was his sister’s governess. She eventually confided in him a shocking account of her first engagement as a governess, which she later recorded in a manuscript that she gave to him before she died.

According to Douglas, the governess was “the youngest of several daughters of a poor country parson” (6). Due to her family’s financial misfortunes, she went to London at age 20 and interviewed with a gentleman “in Harley Street” (6), who needed a governess for his orphaned nephew and niece. The governess felt an unfamiliar attraction to this gentleman. As Douglas explains, he was “a bachelor in the prime of life, such a figure as had never risen, save in a dream or an old novel, before a fluttered anxious girl out of a Hampshire vicarage” (7). To this inexperienced, “anxious girl,” the position the gentleman seeks to fill sounds daunting: The children live at his isolated country house, Bly, and “the young lady who should go down as governess would be in supreme authority” (7), with help only from a housekeeper and a few others, and “she should never trouble him” (9) about any matter.