Jane Arden Gardiner was a British schoolmistress and grammarian, and one of the earliest friends of Mary Wollstonecraft.
14 Facts About Jane Gardiner
1.
2.
Jane Gardiner's interests centred on natural philosophy and belles lettres ; he taught his daughter in moments of leisure.
3.
Jane Gardiner herself was friends with Wollstonecraft: they lived near one another in Beverley for several years, and when the Wollstonecraft family moved away in 1774, the girls wrote letters to one another throughout their teens and early twenties.
4.
Jane Gardiner began teaching early, leaving home in her mid-teens to take up a position as governess to the daughters of Lady Martin in north Norfolk.
5.
Jane Gardiner was succeeded as governess to the Fox-Strangeways family by Agnes Porter, whose memoirs were reprinted in 1998.
6.
Jane Gardiner opened a boarding school for girls in Beverley in 1784, which she directed by herself for thirteen years.
7.
Jane Gardiner went with the Martins to Houghton Hall, then in the possession of Horace Walpole, admiring the famous collection of paintings there.
8.
Jane Gardiner became acquainted with Nelson, and asked him to help improve her understanding of art.
9.
Jane Gardiner married a friend of her younger brother in 1797, and in 1800 they moved, with her pupils, to Elsham Hall, a country house near Elsham, North Lincolnshire.
10.
Jane Gardiner continued managing her school for thirty more years after that.
11.
Jane Gardiner accumulated a library for the benefit of her pupils, totalling 2800 volumes in English, French, and Italian.
12.
In 1836, its owner wanted to take occupancy of the house, so aged 78, Jane Gardiner gave up her school, and died four years later.
13.
Jane Gardiner read the Bible daily, in tandem with Scott's Commentary, and the Golden Treasury by Karl Heinrich von Bogatzky.
14.
Jane Gardiner named her daughter Everilda, the given name of her first employer, Lady Martin.