Mrs Woolf & the Servants

Synopsis: 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.

Review: Brilliantly researched and packed full of information, this was just an eye opener from start to finish. The book is mainly about Virginia Woolf and her rather tempestuous relationships with the servants, in particular her cook Nellie Boxall, but it's also a fairly thorough history of domestic service in Britain during the 19th and 20th centuries. Virginia's attempts to 'manage' her servants are laughable even farcical .. she has absolutely no idea. Ideally she and Leonard would have liked to be servantless (and they actually claimed to be later in life though they conveniently forgot that they employed a gardener and a maid.) Virginia hated the thought of a live-in domestic and found their presence intrusive. Also, not to be too indelicate, she had a horror of the body and it's functions and hand in hand with this came a horror of the poor creatures that were often called upon to deal with the results of these functions .. even when Leonard and Virginia began to earn more money and could have afforded to improve their living conditions (such as install electricity and flushing toilets) they were slow to do it, perhaps they would have been quicker if it had been their job to slop out the chamber pots.

Virginia's diary entries and letters often showed how exasperated and astounded she was by the servants, she could be extremely biting and cruel ...'This is written to while away one of those stupendous moments - one of those painful, ridiculous, agitating moments which make one half sick & yet I don't know - I'm excited too; & feel free & then sordid; & unsettled; & so on - I've told Nelly (she had never learnt to spell her name correctly) to go; after a series of scenes which I won't bore myself to describe. And in the midst of the usual anger, I looked into her little shifting greedy eyes & saw nothing but malice & spite there, & felt that that had come to be the reality now: she doesn't care for me, or for anything: has been eaten up by her poor timid servants fears & cares & respectabilities.'

There were rows and recriminations galore between them with Nellie often getting the better of it, she would sulk and cry, list her grievances and threaten to leave. Virginia was perpetually vexed by her and never quite got over being ordered out of Nellie's room once during an argument. Nellie gave her notice in repeatedly only to retract it later much to Virginia's annoyance and a secret plan had to be hatched to get rid of her (although over the years Virginia was often the one to relent after an argument and to feel that it was better the devil you know.) Eventually and reluctantly Nellie left and found a more convivial situation as cook to Elsa Lanchester and Charles Laughton. But that's not to say that Nellie & Virginia, despite all the turmoil, didn't have a soft spot for each other because in their own dislocated way they did. Virginia just could not comprehend the lower classes, she felt she could never successfully include them in her fiction as she simply couldn't fathom them and feared they would just seem like cardboard cut-outs, they did often inspire stories and characters though. Although both Virginia and Leonard were active members of the Labour party and believed in socialist causes, Virginia often found her public sympathy for the lives of the poor was at odds with her private recoil. She veered between admiring and sympathising with them and being repulsed and bewildered by them, seeing them as little more than dumb animals for the most part (in fact I'm not so sure that she didn't value animals more highly than the working classes.)

It's as always humbling to read about these women and how hard their lot was, terrible living conditions (usually either freezing down in the bowels of the house or stifling up in the attic), the hardest of hard work and the longest of hours without receiving much in the way of either gratitude or wages. There was a stigma too about being a domestic servant, it often meant you couldn't marry well (or at all) so when situations and education improved by the late 19th century young girls were keen to look into factory, shop and office work as a means of escaping a life of drudgery. As a result less and less young women went into service and the domestic staff got older and older.

Fascinating .. both funny and jaw droppingly awful in equal measures. There are some great photo's too, some taken by Virginia's sister Vanessa Bell, which give you a flavour of the life and times.