Cinderellas

"Elsie read better than Philip, though she had the same stunted and truncated education.  She picked up books at Purchase Hall and tried to make sense of them,  She recognised well enough the hunger for something more than housework, of which Marian Oakeshott spoke.  She was thinking much faster than usual, and reflected sardonically that those hungry-minded women, those frustrated female thinkers, of whom Marian Oakeshott spoke, would always need her, Elsie, or someone like her, to carry coals and chop meat and mend clothing and do laundry, or they wouldn't keep alive.  Someone in the scullery, carrying out the ashes.  And if one got out of the scullery, like a disguised princess in a fairytale, there always had to be another, another scullery-maid, to take her place.

Nevertheless, she would like to get out."

The Children's Book  A. S. Byatt