Mrs Woolf and the Servants
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Product Description
Review
Fascinating, beautifully written and meticulously researched (Literary Review )
An absorbing investigation, serious, radical and feminist in its politics, entertaining in its delivery (The Independent )
Offers us an invaluable glimpse into the hidden history of domestic service in an absorbing narrative, beautifully written with the sensibility of a poet (The Times )
A compelling portrait of how rich and poor women of this time were locked into a strange and pernicious symbiosis, and a vital warning against social inequality (Telegraph )
An absorbing investigation, serious, radical and feminist in its politics, entertaining in its delivery (The Independent )
Offers us an invaluable glimpse into the hidden history of domestic service in an absorbing narrative, beautifully written with the sensibility of a poet (The Times )
A compelling portrait of how rich and poor women of this time were locked into a strange and pernicious symbiosis, and a vital warning against social inequality (Telegraph )
Product Description
Virginia Woolf was a feminist and a bohemian but without her servants – cooking, cleaning and keeping house - she might never have managed to write.
Mrs Woolf and The Servants explores the hidden history of service. Through Virginia Woolf’s extensive diaries and letters and brilliant detective work, Alison Light chronicles the lives of those forgotten women who worked behind the scenes in Bloomsbury, and their fraught relations with one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a wonderful work of historical research into the lives of those served the Bloomsbury set and for whom £100 and a room of their own was a far-fetched dream. And for all the Woolfs' socialist principles - in theory only - what mean, petty, querulous employers they were. Yes, it must have been difficult sharing one's home with live-in servants, and Virginia expends much time on household bickering and domestic 'scenes' ; but it wouldn't occur to one, nevertheless, to empty one's own chamberpot - or spend one's substantial income on modernising kitchens and bathrooms. One cheers when after the war, the servants' lives expand.
Would have given this book five stars but I got bored with the literary criticism and lengthy passages about Virginia's state of mind.
Would have given this book five stars but I got bored with the literary criticism and lengthy passages about Virginia's state of mind.
36 of 40 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This is the story of the relationships between Virginia Woolf & her servants. Woolf's diaries are full of references to the sometimes fraught, sometimes affectionate relationship she had with Nellie Boxall, Lottie Hope and many other women who cooked, cleaned & looked after Virginia, Leonard and others of the Bloomsbury group. However, as there is often very little information about the servants (it's amazing how much the author has discovered), the book is also a history of domestic service from 1860-1940. This is fascinating. As an avid reader of women's fiction written between the wars, I'm intrigued by these domestic relationships. WWII virtually ended the era of live-in servants in British middle-class homes, and the descriptions of poor wages & shocking working conditions here go some way to explaining why women who had experienced the independance of the services refused to go back to someone else's kitchen after the war. As well as being an original look at Woolf from the perspective of the servants, this is essential background for anyone who loves the fiction of Mollie Panter-Downes, E M Delafield or Dorothy Whipple.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
In 'A Room of One's Own' Virginia Woolf writes of the need for a woman to have her own space in order to be creative. Frequently in her books and diaries she stresses the need to be independent of others and to be alone, and yet her very existence was underpinned by the need for and use of servants. This book explores the dilemma she confronted in feeling both trapped by and yet still having servants and the conflict she felt between her arguments for women's suffrage and equality and the fact that she spoke of the lower classes and her servants in particular with loathing and despair.
Light does her best to trace Woolf's servant's lives and juxtaposes them with that of Virginia and her husband Leonard. It is fascinating reading for the most part and uses a novel and inventive way to cast an eye on social history in the making.
Where it falls down is that these servants were meant to be nobodies and with the odd exception there are no real records of their lives and thoughts surviving. The ones that did end up being interviewed after Virginia's death and when the Bloomsbury Group as a whole became a subject for television and radio, their memories are, as Light is keen to point out, necessarily biased.
Quite often Light has to fall back on generalisations or statistics and for me this made an odd bedfellow to the intimacies of the Woolf household in the diaries.
Light does her best to trace Woolf's servant's lives and juxtaposes them with that of Virginia and her husband Leonard. It is fascinating reading for the most part and uses a novel and inventive way to cast an eye on social history in the making.
Where it falls down is that these servants were meant to be nobodies and with the odd exception there are no real records of their lives and thoughts surviving. The ones that did end up being interviewed after Virginia's death and when the Bloomsbury Group as a whole became a subject for television and radio, their memories are, as Light is keen to point out, necessarily biased.
Quite often Light has to fall back on generalisations or statistics and for me this made an odd bedfellow to the intimacies of the Woolf household in the diaries.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Average.
It strikes me this is a book by someone desperate to write about Woolf, but hampered by the masses of literature already existing on her. Read more
Published 21 months ago by random bint
Disappointing
Having been an avid reader of any kind of Bloomsbury-Virginia Woolf material for many years (I still read her diaries for pleasure) I found the book disappointing and lacking depth... Read more
Published on 5 Feb 2009 by Alexander McKay
This is a great, multi-faceted book, glittering with details of Virginia Woolf's class-cluttered mind but also an intimate exploration to home life for rich and poor women... Read more
Published on 1 April 2008 by Mrs H
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