women household employees

An epistolary novel about a teenage servant in eighteenth-century England who tries desperately to keep her virtue as her master tirelessly attempts to despoil her. Includes an introduction, bibliography, Richardson chronology, and notes.

Grace Bradley went to work at Riverton House as a servant when she was just a girl, before the First World War. For years her life was inextricably tied up with the Hartford family, most particularly the two daughters, Hannah and Emmeline. In the summer of 1924, at a glittering society party held at the house, a young poet shot himself. The only witnesses were Hannah and Emmeline and only they--and Grace--know the truth. In 1999, when Grace is ninety-eight years old and living out her last days in a nursing home, she is visited by a young director who is making a film about the events of that summer. She takes Grace back to Riverton House and reawakens her memories--From publisher description.

While working as an au pair for a family with four children, Lucy, a young woman from the West Indies, comes to terms with the problems in her employers' lives and her feelings about her own sexuality.

In the fall of 1938, Germany is changing rapidly under Hitler's regime. Christine Bolz, a seventeen-year-old domestic is in love with her wealthy and cultured Jewish employer's son, Isaac Bauerman. But any plans they have made are gone as Germany begins sending its Jews to concentration camps. Desperate to be with the man she loves, Christine must confront the Gestapo and Dachau.

It is 1906, and when her family is cheated out of their tavern, fourteen-year-old Minnie Bonner is forced to become a maid to the Sump family, who are moving to San Francisco--three weeks before the great earthquake.