SOURCE: An introduction to A Governess in the Age of Jane Austen: The Journals and Letters of Agnes Porter, The Hambledon Press, 1998, pp. 1-74.

In the following excerpt, the journals and letters of late eighteenth-century governess Agnes Porter are discussed. Comparisons are made between Porter's experiences and those portrayed in Jane Austen's fiction.

Ann Agnes Porter was born in Edinburgh, a few years after the Jacobite rising of 1745.¹ For twenty years between 1784 and 1806, living in Somerset, Dorset and then South Wales, she was governess to the children and grandchildren of the second Earl of Ilchester. Agnes's first surviving journal was written in 1788, four years after she had joined Lord Ilchester's family, and a little over a year before the fall of the Bastille. Her last letter was written in January 1814. She died at Bruton in Somerset in the following month, just as twenty years of war between Britain...