Man and Maid by Edith Nesbit

Aunt Kate was the great comfort of Kitty's existence. Always kindly, helpful, sympathetic, no girlish trouble was too slight, no girlish question too difficult for her tender heart -- her delicate insight. How different from grim Aunt Eliza, with whom it was Kitty's fate to live. Aunt Eliza was severe, methodical, energetic. In household matters she spared neither herself nor her niece. Kitty could darn and mend and bake and dust and sweep in a way which might have turned the parents of the bluest Girtonian green with envy. She had read a great deal, too -- the really solid works that are such a nuisance to get through, and that leave a mark on one's mind like the track of a steamroller. That was Aunt Eliza's doing. Kitty ought to have been grateful -- but she wasn't. She didn't want to be improved with solid books. She wanted to write books herself.

She did write little tales when her aunt was out on business, which was often, and she dreamed of the day when she should write beautiful books, poems, romances. These Aunt Eliza classed roughly as "stuff and nonsense"; and one day, when she found Kitty reading the _Girls' Very Own Friend_, she tore that harmless little weekly across and across and flung it into the fire. Then she faced Kitty with flushed face and angry eyes.