About book Mrs. Woolf And The Servants: An Intimate History Of Domestic Life In Bloomsbury (2008)
Having read Hermione Lee's biography this was a great glimpse into the lives of the Bloomsbury servants who were a largely forgotten yet integral part of the households of people like Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Clive and Vanessa Bell, Robert Fry etc , keeping them heated, clean and fed. Alison Light also tried to place their lives within the larger context of domestic service and the shifting demands and expectations of British society. A quick and interesting read combining biography and social history. This is a fascinating glimpse of a facet of British society. Looking through the lens of the servant class and service Alison Light makes life in the Bloomsbury group and Virginia and Leonard Woolf her subject. In telling all this, she has to pretty much explain British prewar society and give us a history of British domestic service. She tells it well, I think. The book is a chronology of Woolf's life and an account of her uncomfortable relationship with those who worked for her. More, the book also presents a biography--or the story--however sketchy, of each servant who worked for her. And in those stories and in the chapters dedicated to explanations of the service is a history of British domestic help. Light has written an important addition to Virginia Woolf studies. Because her book, in describing Woolf's relation to domestic help, thoroughly details the social system that produced the servant class, the need for them, the importance of individuals having service to go into, the evolution of dependence on them, and the relation of all these facts to each other, it also covers much of modern British social history. Virginia Woolf is a Bloomsbury star, of course, and her clumsiness and unease with domestics well known, but other Bloomsbury domestic styles and arrangements are also described by Light. The household of Roger Fry has its own chapter. Vanessa Bell, Virginia's sister, was apparently more traditionally-minded about servants. And Light also tells the interesting saga of Nellie Boxall, fired by Virginia, who later worked for years for Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester. An absorbing read. One worry, a minor one. I like to read similar books simultaneously, thinking I can get more focus on a subject that way. I read this at the same time I read Glendinning's biography of Leonard Woolf and was surprised at how closely some of her impressions and ways of telling of a particular event matched up with the earlier work. But I tell myself we know so much about these people it's hard to find fresh soil that'll yield new fruit. It's enough that Light was able to come at Virginia Woolf from this angle, approaching her from the kitchen.
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useful for anyone writing pieces with servants in them
—Carhart
