The governess is a familiar figure in 19th-century fiction, writes Maggie Hartford. Despised, ill-paid, insecure, isolated and terminally lonely, she appears in novels like Jane Eyre or Vanity Fair.

The feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, was one of the few to escape this fate, while her husband's step-daughter, Claire Clairmont, succumbed, despite being a friend (or more) of Byron and Shelley.

Each gets a chapter to herself in Other People's Children: Life and Times of the Governess (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, £20). Author Ruth Brandon draws on journals and letters to conjure up a picture of what life must have been like for middle-class women who didn't marry. In the mid-19th century, only 57 per cent of English women over 20 were married, but there were few options for intelligent young women who now go to university and have a career.

The book ends with the founding of Girton College, Cambridge, Brandon's alma mater. She concludes that Girton's vote to admit men, in the belief that there was no longer a need for all-women colleges, was the final moment of change in the world that Wollstonecraft dreamed of.

This seems a little premature in view of the evidence on the low pay and housework duties experienced by the average woman today. But there is no doubt that middle-class educated women, at any rate, can at least aspire to an existence financially independent of men without living as a semi-servant in someone else's household.