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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26447 in Books
• Published on: 2008-08-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

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 )

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.'

From the Back Cover
`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

`Compelling' Telegraph

`Illuminating' Harper's Bazaar

`Fascinating, beautifully written and meticulously researched' Literary
Review

`Light has uncovered material that is fascinating and important, both in
itself and for what it tells us about Bloomsbury and domestic service...an
absorbing investigation, serious, radical and feminist in its politics,
entertaining in its delivery' The Independent

Customer Reviews

Domestic bliss?
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.

Hidden lives
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.

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 throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Provides among other things a thoughtful and thought-provoking look at how individual freedom often depends on the oppression of others: bohemian feminist Virginia Woolf and her lasting work comes to us courtesy of a crack team of wives...