Mrs Woolf and the Servants

A lot of people were raving about this when it first came out, almost a year ago. I was interested, but not enough to rush out and get a copy. I've dabbled a bit in Woolf myself -- that is, taught her novels on and off -- written an essay on her last year which had me plunging into the diaries and the letters and reading Hermione Lee's great biography -- so perhaps I thought I knew it all. How wrong was I? Last week a kind friend lent me a copy, and I have been reading it with enormous pleasure. Yes, it is about Virginia (and Vanessa and Leonard and a multitude of others) and how she (and they) related to the women who worked for them, and a sorry tale that often is. But it is so much more than this. Truly, in fact, this is a most wonderful piece of social history -- a tremendous sweep through the first half of the twentieth century, and one which really opens your eyes to the shocking inequalities of the English class system. Alison Light's own grandmother was in domestic service, as indeed were a huge percentage of girls in the early years of the last century. I guess this fact has given a little extra edge to her exploration of the lives of these forgotten women: Sophie Farrell the cook, born in rural Lincolnshire, who worked for VW's parents and then in various other Bloomsbury homes until she was 70; Lotte Hope, a foundling, who worked for the Woolfs and the Bells for most of her adult life; Nellie Boxall, who cooked for the Woolfs for over twenty years until she was harshly dismissed; Louie Everest, who worked at Monks House for many years and stayed with Leonard until his death; and many others, all of whose lives Alison Light has researched with extraordinary thoroughness. And not just their individual lives, either -- there is so much wonderful background here -- to give just one example, there is a fascinating section of the book which deals with the admirable philanthropic women of the late Victorian period who set up homes for orphans and foundlings, offering them education and training enough to get them respectable jobs in service. It was from one such home that Lotte Hope emerged, and lucky in many senses it was that she did so, given her start in life:
"In the great dustheap of late-Victorian Britain, Lotte Hope was at the bottom of the pile: a pauper without parents, dark-complexioned to boot, with a shock of black, frizzy hair so that people thought she might have been a gypsy or have foreign blood".  A terrific character she was, glamorous, lively, full of fun and laughter though also possessed of a fierce temper  -- she appears in several photos, always laughing. Indeed, in general, it is astonishing to see how relatively contented these women were with their pretty awful lot in life. And it is that lot -- to be treated, quite honestly, as a lower form of life -- that is the most painful part of the whole book. Yes, they were lucky to work for the Bloomsburys in many ways -- at least the households were more relaxed, no-one was expected to wear a uniform, and the servants, or some of them, were sometimes allowed to join in the fringes of parties and fun. But the conditions in which they were expected to work were often worse than in more conventional households, as for instance when the Woolfs refused to put in flush toilets at Monks House, so that someone had daily to empty the earth closet. And even when Virginia and Leonard's joint income had risen to £4000 a year, they were still only paying their servants a yearly wage of about £40.
To tell the truth, Virginia does not come out well from this book. Admittedly, she did have a lot to learn -- having come from a typically comfortable home where servants were servants and kept firmly in their places, and where no one in the family ever lifted a finger to do any work, she was forced to learn to cook, occasionally even to wash up, and later in life started scrubbing floors (though that was for therapeutic reasons). But she seems to have had real problems in actually understanding what these women's lives might be like, or in treating them in any way as equals. Yes, she struggled with the ambivalence of her feelings, but not with any great success in terms of her behaviour. It is strange to reflect that in the last weeks of her life, her rather enlightened doctor recommended housework to her as an antidote to her increasing mental deterioration, so that she actually spent the last morning of her life dusting alongside Louie Everest, until "After a while she put down her duster and went away".
This great book is about to come out in paperback. Do get hold of it and read it.