If You Want to Send a Message, Call Western Union*

By Rebecca Kennison (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0

There is a story I read when I was a younger person (in, of all things, a compendium of fiction and articles from the first 100 years of theLadies Home Journal) set in the 19th century, and about a young English woman working in a huge Russian household as a governess, who is trying to navigate the politics of this large group of people**. Because she is not exactly a servant, but not exactly a member of...