charlady

This is Lesley Manville in last summer’s “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris,” playing a British charlady in midcentury England who saves her money to realize her dream of owning a Dior gown.

If anyone can straighten out this mess, it’s Mrs. Groynes, the charlady for the police station and the mastermind of the town’s criminal activities.

But that vindication comes long after the madcap plot has wended its way through the town’s seedier holiday attractions and bumped up against a ragtag selection of miscreants, among the police-station charlady and “criminal mastermind,” Mrs Groynes.

Robbie held the man's eye and answered pleasantly that his father had walked out long ago and that his mother was a charlady who supplemented her income as an occasional clairvoyant.

Punished for being in a different circle at Cambridge, for not having a charlady for a mother; mocked for her poor degree—not that they actually awarded degrees to women anyway.