A Protégée of the Mistress (Vospitannitsa, Воспитанница; also, The Ward Girl) is a play by Alexander Ostrovsky, first published in the No.1, January 1859 issue of Biblioteka Dlya Chteniya.
On July 12 of that year he prepared a rough draft of the Act 1 and compiled a list of characters, some of which (retired official Zakhar Zveroboyev, merchant Savva Bruskov), were later dropped.
The play's original title was "Game for a Cat, Tears for a Mouse" (Koshke igrushki, myshke slyozki), with a subtitle "Pictures of Rural Life".
"[6] Nikolai Dobrolyubov, reviewing the play in 1859, called it "quite remarkable" and praised the author's restraint in dealing with main heroine's character's more ugly features.
"How much does this little drama say, what lively characters and scenes are being presented here for a viewer's imagination," marveled otherwise harsh Dmitry Pisarev in his Scholastics of the XIX Century (1861).
Nikolai Akhsharumov argued that Ostrovsky's writing style was sketch-like and his characters except for Nadya were caricatures, "...filtered out from lumps of human dirt of all kinds" and "making heavy impression upon one's heart" as the author was keen only to depict only "the dirtier spots of life.