Mrs Woolf and the Servants
The only Virginia Woolf book I can say that I love is Mrs Dalloway. I gave To The Lighthouse a try but never really managed to get into it although I slogged it out till the end (oh dear, I hope that doesn’t put you off it). So I’m not really a Woolf fan and never really desired to know about her life, but somehow the premise of Mrs Woolf and the Servants intrigued me.
The author’s preface aided that attraction. She describes her own interest in Woolf’s relationship with her servants, in particular Nellie Boxall, her cook whom she both despised and needed. Author Alison Light’s own grandmother was a live-in servant, which added to her fascination with life of servants. Also, did you ever see the movie Gosford Park
Virginia Woolf grew up with servants. They picked up clothes, washed, cleaned, shopped and cooked, helped one dress. In a house of servants one was never truly alone. But the times they were a-changing (what with women doing their part during the World Wars and all), and service jobs were no longer as sought after, nor did one desire having live-in servants. Light details the everyday lives of these women in service, and their relationship to Woolf and her family (such as her sister Vanessa and her husband Leonard). And she also traces the backgrounds of some of Woolf’s servants, such as Nellie Boxall and Sophie, which was quite interesting to me but I suspect that if you’re reading this as a Woolf fan, then maybe not so much for you.
“Writing sustained Virginia Stephen; it was immensely gratifying, a physical as well as mental delight. ‘I love writing for the sake of writing,’ she noted, enjoying covering the page with ink, the rhythms of writing, which could soothe as well as excite. If writing was a temporary suspension of self-consciousness, it was also a very conscious self-pleasuring. Though she often despaired of what she produced, and even felt at times ‘like one rolled at the bottom of a green flood, smoothed, obliterated’, she was amazed to find, going under, that her pockets were still full of words.’”
And as Light discovers in Woolf’s earlier drafts of her famous works, Woolf was herself intrigued by her servants, often writing in these domestic servants, and later removing them: “servants, as ever, were Virginia’s window on the world, the chinks of light glimpsed through the thick hedges of class feeling which boxed her in”. We don’t only hear from Woolf of course, there are letters from her family’s longtime cook Sophie and we also hear quite a bit from Nellie, with whom she had this odd tumultuous relationship (Woolf gives her notice, Nellie gives her own notice, but refuses to go, and in the end they stay together for 18 years).
“Nonetheless, after centuries of domestic servants in Britain, what it meant to be a servant – and to have servants – is still a remarkably undiscovered country, perhaps, because the history of service is so peculiarly bound up with our relation to maternal or paternal care, to what happens at home as well as in the wider world of economic relations.”
Eh, I’m terrible at writing reviews of books, especially non-fiction ones. But I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this read. I thought it might be too academic a read for me (especially one who’s not all that familiar with Woolf, her life or her works), as Light’s other book sounds like it belongs in a university library: Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars. However, it was a pretty good non-fiction read, aided by Light’s extensive research and writing. Would this book have been a better read if I had actually been familiar with Woolf’s other works? Yeah, probably, but reading Mrs Woolf and the Servants left me with a better appreciation for Woolf’s writing and I made a mental note to read some of her other works, such as Night and Day, as well as other works that Light mentions like Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton and Rosamond Lehmann’s Invitation to the Waltz.
I would have made a terrible servant, but I’ve liked the books that I’ve read about their lives, fiction and otherwise. The first novel that comes to mind is Margaret Forster’s Lady’s Maid. Sooo good.
Gosford Park is one of my favorite movies. I’m not sure I’d pick up this particular book, but like you, I’m intrigued by the relationships between servants and the families/people they work for.
I feel the need to go watch Gosford Park again!