in the full range of subjects, but should focus on domestic skills. Elizabeth Sandford wrote for women in support of this view, whilst others such as Susanna Corder ran a novel Quaker girls' school at Abney Park, instituted by the philanthropist William Allen, which dissented from convention by teaching all the latest sciences as early as the 1820s. In Education of the Heart: Women's Best Work (1869), Sarah Ellis accepted the importance of intellectual education for women alongside training in domestic duties but stressed that since women were the earliest educators of the men who predominantly ran and decided upon education in Victorian society, women primarily needed a system of education that developed sound moral character in their offspring. Ellis aimed much of her prescriptive writing in the 1840s and 1850s at the expanding lower middle class in the suburbs. Her readers were women who might be the first in their family to employ a domestic servant, striving to adapt to an exclusively domestic role. Understandably, historians have focused on Ellis's education of these women in domestic duties, along with appropriate submission to their husbands: in the famous phrase, to "suffer and be still." However, there was another side to her writing. She insisted that women should remain single if they could not find a "reasonable" husband. She was conscious of the widespread incidence of marital disharmony in middle-class marriages as women struggled to submit to husbands whom Ellis calls, ambiguously, "the lords of creation", and she wrote of the need for wives to "humor" or manipulate their husbands in their own interests and in the interests of marital harmony. In private correspondence, she spoke of tensions in her own marriage with William Ellis and of friends who had left their husbands. Later life After 35 years of marriage, the Ellises died within a week of each other in June 1872. Being of independent mind, she was buried in the countryside near their home, whilst her husband was laid to rest in the Congregationalists' non-denominational Abney Park Cemetery on the outskirts of Victorian London. Selected works Rawdon House The Beautiful in Nature & Art The Family Monitor Northern Roses Education of the Heart: Women's Best Work The Wives of England The Women of England The Mothers of England The Daughters of England Knife A Summer and Winter in the Pyrenees Social Distinctions; or Hearts and Homes (1848–1849) Look to the