task-mistress

You will consider yourself as the task-mistress, and the common herd of female servants as so many negroes directing themselves by your nod; or yourself as the master-wheel, in some beautiful pieces of mechanism, whose dignified grave motions is to set a-going all the under-wheels, with a velocity suitable to their respective parts.

Pamela 2006

Not only were his days filled with university work, but his spare hours were fully dedicated to the arts under the eye of a beloved task-mistress.

Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin 2005

Not only under the lash of my task-mistress, but the drudge of the maid, apprentices and children, I never had a taste of human kindness to soften the rigour of perpetual labour.

Maria; or The Wrongs of Woman 2002

Upborne by new ideals, I resolved to study through the vacation that followed, and to my surprise this was not an infliction but a pleasure, now that I was my own task-mistress.

The Bacillus of Beauty A Romance of To-day Harriet Stark

And now what a stern task-mistress she had become!

The Happy Venture Edith Ballinger Price 1947

Devoted, indeed, these disciples were, in no ordinary sense of the term; for certainly she was no light task-mistress, and he who set out to be of use to Miss Nightingale was apt to find, before he had gone very far, that he was in truth being made use of in good earnest—to the very limit of his endurance and his capacity.

Florence Nightingale: Part III 1918

Adversity may be a hard task-mistress, but she is an excellent teacher in the school of life, and their Spartan upbringing had given the Gascoynes a certain resourcefulness and grit of character that they might possibly have lacked in more affluent surroundings.

The Youngest Girl in the Fifth A School Story Angela Brazil 1907

'I may be sending you to your death, Hannay -- Good God, what a damned task-mistress duty is!

Greenmantle John Buchan 1907

Madam Judith Cavendish was a stern task-mistress, and especially for these latter duties.

The Heart's Highway: A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century 1900

Madam Judith Cavendish was a stern task-mistress, and especially for these latter duties.

The Heart's Highway Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman 1891