The school in which a girl of sixteen might find herself teaching, on Prince Edward Island in the 1880s, was usually a single room.
One teacher took every child in the district, from the smallest learning letters on a slate to the oldest, who might be preparing for the entrance examination to the teachers’ college in Charlottetown. Classes were taught in turn while the others worked; the older pupils often heard the younger ones’ lessons. The room was heated by a single stove.
A teacher was hired by the district’s trustees, usually for a year at a time, and was paid by them — modestly, and less if she was a woman. Young teachers often boarded with a local family. Many taught for only a few years, to save for further study or until they married; the work was a door out of the farm for a great many young women who had no other.
It is in that setting that the stories of this period should be read. A girl who gives up a college scholarship to teach the village school is not choosing a small life out of timidity. She is taking the one paid, respectable, independent work open to her, in the place where someone needs her.