Accounts of iconic female teachers and students—Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Eyre, Lucy Snow, Jane Fairfax, Claire Claremont, Anna Jameson, Emma Bovary—are part of the engrossing history Christina de Bellaigue addresses in Educating Women: Schooling and Identity in England and France, 1800–1867. This is empirical scholarship at its best: in the extensive footnotes intriguing evidence of newly recovered historical actors vies with the author's narrative for the reader's attention. To construct her story, de Bellaigue has consulted the obvious historiographical and prescriptive works in England and France. Beyond these, she has made her careful way through myriad archival sources in both countries and formulated her findings so that real women are allowed to speak for themselves, actual contemporaneous surveys are reported in their authors’ voices, and, as a result, venerable assumptions about female education, educators, students, curricula, and bureaucrats are corrected by statistical analysis of original prosopographical data. De Bellaigue succeeds in calling attention to correcting, extending, and refining modern understanding of nineteenth-century private education by, for, and about women on both sides of the Channel.

In her introduction, de Bellaigue explains that “by exploring the emergence and expansion of private schooling for girls, looking at the recruitment and training of schoolmistresses; the strategies involved in establishing a school and claiming professional standing; the lives of schoolgirls and instruction they received; and the experiences of pupils and teachers who crossed the Channel, this book illuminates unexplored areas of the history of women and of education” (9). What she uncovers in her explorations is a rich vein of aspiration, activity, entrepreneurship, and struggle as women in the differing cultures shared a common need to be paid for the work of educating others and, frequently, were motivated by ambitions to be trained, credentialed, and recognized as professionals in this work. De Bellaigue is interested in the complex tensions between social constraints on women, particularly prohibitions against public exposure that were reinforced by notions of domestic femininity, and the exertions of those women who nonetheless did teach, seek advanced education for themselves to do so, and created idiosyncratic career paths, even before there were governmental requirements for proprietors or school mistresses. In England, these were later in coming, while in France, the failure of the educational reforms of the French Revolution left a vacuum that the Catholic convent model continued to fill.

The chapter titled “Becoming a Schoolmistress” provides data that contradict the gendered fiction of the female teacher as a tragic, isolated victim of “reduced circumstances.” In both England and France, de Bellaigue advises, such stereotypes of governesses and schoolmistresses were challenged by the means women devised to become and sustain themselves as teachers. Jane Fairfax, Jane Austen's equivocal character in Emma, is saved from the dreaded fate of having to become a governess only by a Cinderella rescue—marriage to a wealthy young man. Fascinatingly, in England marriage signified the end of a woman's career as a teacher, with the corollary that some women taught as a way to avoid marriage. In France, marriage often enhanced a schoolmistress's opportunities to advance herself or her school. For those who persisted, women engaged in the commercial “business of school-keeping” (chap. 3, 74–100) met with less tolerance by the mid-nineteenth century. However, as de Bellaigue demonstrates, in England and France the transformation of education from a commercial pursuit to a profession was already underway and apparently unstoppable. Despite national and religious differences, women in both cultures were part of the transition to more liberal conceptions of education. The role of the state involvement in codifying teaching as a profession also differed in the two countries: in France women were integrated into the elaborate state system much earlier than in England, which only in 1864 finally moved toward official recognition of women as professional educators.

What about the students the schoolmistresses taught? De Bellaigue argues that the data do not support the common assumption that attendance at private school was mainly for social mobility. English middle-class girls went to private boarding schools for all kinds of reasons. Once there, they enjoyed homelike settings, relative degrees of freedom, even, for some, a burgeoning autonomy in choosing the direction of their future lives. In France, too, middle-class daughters populated the lay boarding schools, while aristocratic girls were sent to convents. But French girls often found being sent to boarding school traumatic: their stays at school were longer, the school culture more socially hierarchical, and they more frequently complained of the restrictive rules they were obliged to follow. De Bellaigue reads such accounts as indicative of the “formal institutional model adopted in France [compared with] the domestic pattern followed in England” (163). Religious traditions also influenced students’ experience, from the Catholic model of enclosure, quoting Madame de Maintenon, to “preserve pupils from the corruption of the secular world,” as compared with the Protestant idea that adolescent girls should be inculcated in “self-government.” In the period under study in both countries, there was increasing willingness to experiment with curricula, attempts to become more scientific in educating girls, and growing importance attached to girls’ academic success. This was reflected in greater competition among students, as well as the introduction of examinations during and on leaving school. De Bellaigue suggests that such developments “combined to expand, and ultimately to undermine, ideals of domestic womanhood” (199).

The data about cross-Channel exchanges between teachers and students are less encouraging. Although there was a good deal of traffic between England and France with English women seeking positions or setting up schools in France and vice versa, and even some deliberate attempts to learn from each other, the pronounced differences between “Englishness and Frenchness” (230) proved more powerful than pedagogical curiosity or willingness to learn. De Bellaigue concludes her discussion titled “Crossing the Channel” with the sober reminder that, “although both French and English women were routinely crossing national frontiers in this period, the boundaries of gender were more difficult to transgress” (230).