The governess was a familiar figure in Victorian England. Some of them, like Maud, were ‘bluestockings’—a nickname for free-thinking women who fought for female education. Also, like Maud, many governesses were cultured women who had fallen on hard times.
In their employment they were expected to provide both academic and moral education, often for low pay and in insecure conditions. Many governesses existed between two worlds, not accepted by the servants or by the family, and some were at the mercy of their more unscrupulous employers.
The Governesses’ Benevolent Institution, to which Maud turns, provided aid for needy and retired governesses in straitened circumstances. Today, this society still exists in the form of the Teaching Staff Trust.
Governesses were known to use fables and fairy tales for female education. Like Maud’s Butterfly Fables, such tales were often full of wonder, wisdom and often warnings to women.
One such governess, Madame Leprince de Beaumont, published educational guides for young ladies. Her Moral Tales (1744 and 1776) became famous handbooks, and included an early English translation of Beauty and the Beast.
Louisa May Alcott, best known for Little Women, wrote Flower Fables (1860), to instruct and entertain Ellen Emerson, the daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson, while author and illustrator Cicely Mary Barker ran a kindergarten with her sister—she modelled her famous Flower Fairies (1925) upon the children who attended it.
In Maud’s era, many species of butterflies fluttered across British landscapes. Butterfly-catching was a popular hobby.
The Butterfly Vivarium or Insect Home: being an account of a new method of observing the curious metamorphoses of some of the most beautiful of our native insects, by Henry Noel Humphreys, published in London in 1858, became a bestseller.
Sadly, many British butterflies are now rarely sighted. The Swallowtail, Britain’s biggest butterfly, is threatened with extinction due to the salination of Britain’s lakes and marshes. The Small Tortoiseshell is also facing declining numbers.
Learn more about butterflies from The Association for Butterflies—you can even attend Butterfly College—support Butterfly Education and Awareness Day in the USA, or aid their conservation in Britain by joining The Big Butterfly Count.
Visit elizaredgold.com to see beautiful images of a Victorian butterfly vivarium.
Dominic’s background as a railway entrepreneur is set against the founding of the West Cornish Railway Company. In the 1840s and 1850s this railway company was formed by local businessmen and men of standing in the community, offering new economic hope to Cornwall.
Dominic’s passion and energy for the railway captures the pride emerging in Cornwall at that time. Its heritage remained in the form of the Cornish Riviera Express—one of the railway wonders of the world.
For a romantic getaway you can still catch the Night Riviera sleeper to Cornwall. Or climb aboard the magical Christmas Train of Lights!
Saffron has been grown in Cornwall for centuries and has long been used to flavour its local cuisine—not least its famous saffron buns.
The brightly coloured orange-red stigma of the crocus flower—saffron—turns food to gold when cooked and, because of the necessity to harvest the spice by hand, it is worth its weight in gold, too.
A natural aphrodisiac, saffron was often used in marriage customs. Rather than rose petals, the marriage bed was once sprinkled with strands of saffron to ensure happiness and good fortune.
Scheherazade’s fairy tales are some of the most famous and fabulous fairy tales ever told. Known as The Arabian Nights or One Thousand and One Nights, her tales embroidered flying carpets, magical lamps and wish-granting genies.
Scheherazade told her stories to save her life and those of other women. As vengeance against his wife, who had betrayed him, a sultan vowed to take a new wife every night. One of these was Scheherazade, but she had a plan of her own.
On her wedding night, she told stories full of such adventure and intrigue that the Sultan could not resist asking her to continue to tell them. She told her tales for a thousand nights and by the end of them the Sultan had fallen in love with her and seen the errors of his ways.
Do read more about Scheherazade, or listen to the famous music by Rimsky-Korsakov, inspired by her tales.
Interwoven into my story is Tennyson’s poem Maud (1855). Full of desire and conflict, it is the inspiration for Maud and Dominic’s story—which for them ended happily ever after.
Visit elizaredgold.com for more.