Background
Gardiner was the daughter of John Arden, a scholar and lecturer, who is best known as one of Mary Wollstonecraft’s early teachers.
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Jane Gardiner
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Career
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. 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. In 1780 she moved across England to the household of Lord Ilchester of Redlynch, Somerset.
She was succeeded in this post by Agnes Porter, whose memoirs were reprinted in 1998.
Gardiner opened a boarding school for girls in Beverley in 1784, which she directed by herself for thirteen years. By this point she had reconciled herself to her fate: "I own that the life of a governess would not have been my choice, but I am content." Not all governesses were oppressed and isolated.
She says on a return visit that the Martin family treated her "more as a daughter than as an humble "gouvernante"". She went with the Martins to Houghton Hall, then in the possession of Horace Walpole, admiring the famous collection of paintings there.
She became acquainted with Nelson, and asked him to help improve her understanding of art
Her parents died c. 1794. She continued managing her school for thirty more years after that. She accumulated a library for the benefit of her pupils, totalling 2800 volumes in English, French, and Italian.
In 1814 the family and school moved to Ashby Hall.
In 1836, its owner wanted to take occupancy of the house, so aged 78, Gardiner gave up her school, and died four years later.
