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Henry JamesA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
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.
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