- Hardcover: 400 pages
- Publisher: Fig Tree (2 Aug 2007)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0670867179
- ISBN-13: 978-0670867172
- Product Dimensions: 23.8 x 15.6 x 4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 247,962 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Mrs Woolf and the Servants
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Product Description
Product Description
Loathing, anger, shame – and deep affection: Virginia Woolf’s relationship with her servants was central to her life. Like thousands of her fellow Britons she relied on live-in domestics for the most intimate of daily tasks. Her cook and parlour maid relieved her of the burden of housework and without them she might never have become a writer. But unlike many of her contemporaries Virginia Woolf was frequently tormented by her dependence on servants. Uniquely, she explored her violent, often vicious, feelings in her diaries, novels and essays. What, the reader might well wonder, was it like for the servants to live with a mistress who so hated giving her orders, and who could be generous and hostile by turns?Through the prism of the writer’s life and work, Alison Light explores the volatile, emotional territory which is the hidden history of domestic service. Compared to most employers in Britain between the wars, Leonard and Virginia Woolf were free and easy. Life in the Bloomsbury circle of writers and artists was often fun. Yet despite being liberal in outlook, these were also households where the differences in upbringing and education were acute: employers and servants were still ‘us’ and ‘them’. The women who worked for the Woolfs, like other domestic servants, have usually been relegated to the margins of history, yet unearthing their lives reveals fascinating stories: of Sophie Farrell, the Victorian cook and ‘family treasure’, who ended her days in a London bed-sit; Lottie Hope, the parlour maid, a foundling, who’d been left on a doorstep like a parcel; and Nellie Boxall, the Woolfs’ cook, who was finally dismissed after sixteen years of rows and reconciliations, only to find herself a more glamorous job. Mrs Woolf and the Servants is a riveting and highly original study of one of Britain’s greatest literary modernists. Ultimately, though, it is also a moving and eloquent testimony to the ways in which individual creativity always needs the support of others.
From the Inside Flap
'Have I ever felt such wild misery as when talking to servants?
Partly caused by rage at our general ineptitude - we the governors - having
laden ourselves with such a burden, at having let grow on our shoulders
such a cancer, such a growth, such a disease as the poor are.'
Partly caused by rage at our general ineptitude - we the governors - having
laden ourselves with such a burden, at having let grow on our shoulders
such a cancer, such a growth, such a disease as the poor are.'
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Customer Reviews
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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