Almost totally forgotten since it was published in 1855, Elizabeth Pope Whately's The Roving Bee is now available for the first time in more than a century and a half. This novel explores in realistic detail the life of an Irish governess. Not only is The Roving Bee a good read, but it reveals in rich cultural detail the tensions in nineteenth-century Ireland, especially those between the rich and the poor and between Protestants and Roman Catholics. The governess Dora Leighton is the "roving bee" of the title. As she "peeps" into many "hives"-the households where she is employed to teach-we readers peep also. Through Dora's eyes we see highlighted the class differences, disagreements about making the Bible available to the people, the prominence of money, the arrogance of the newly rich, and the frustrations of the eternal poor. We observe the domestic details of everyday life in various nineteenth-century families. We watch gender issues work themselves out.

We even hear the Irish dialect of some of the speakers. In his introduction, editor Peter G. Beidler argues that Henry James had probably read The Roving Bee, and that his having done so influenced in interesting ways two of his novellas, "The Pupil," published in 1891, and The Turn of the Screw, first published in 1898.