"Whether she was a distressed member of the gentry or social upstart, the governess also reflected a new social fluidity, at once both dynamic and destabilizing. She was a reminder that, in this brave new world, one could go up - but also down - the social ladder with startling rapidity. 'Reader, I married him,' Jane Eyre triumphantly asserts - words that would have filled the average Victorian mistress of the house with dread for the safety of her son."
