There’s a wonderfully engrossing review of Alison Light’s Mrs Woolf and the Servants: The Hidden Heart of Domestic Service over in the LRB; like many LRB reviews, reading it has made me feel as edified as if I’d read the whole book, which I haven’t yet and must do.
It had always struck me, as I’m sure many other readers, as surprising that someone capable of writing a piece of such piercing humanity as A Room of One’s Own should seem so ambivalent towards certain others of her fellow beings; her feminist impulses, as has commonly been noted, were strangely limited to the middle and upper classes.
The review (and so presumably the book) paints the picture of a woman not uninterested by or hardened towards her servants and the serving classes in general, but enormously perplexed as to the proper way in which to conduct relations with them:
Her mother had ruled Hyde Park Gate with absolute confidence in the ‘old laws of life . . . a house, servants, establishments’. Without them her daughters were liberated, but also adrift… Released from Victorian certainty, mistress and servant were drawn into a different, more uneasily intimate relationship, which Virginia in particular found difficult.
Particularly fascinating are considerations of the ways in which Woolf’s bouts of mental illness led her to depend on her female staff, and the further complications caused as a result.
I thought that those who had read the review might be interested in the following extract from our recent Woolf title, The Platform of Time: Memoirs of Family and Friends. Editor and Woolf scholar S.P. Rosenbaum notes that the piece entitled ‘The Cook’ ‘is a reminiscence of the Stephen family cook of more than fifty years’, and it’s a lovely example of precisely the type of uneasy intimacy balanced by fear which apparently characterised Woolf’s relationships with her servants:
Miss Ursula and Miss Kate and Miss Ann, Master John and Master Richard, and Master Hugh didn’t dare, so they always said, to face old Biddy. When they married, their first thoughts, so they said was, will Biddy like him or her? She had a way of summing you up, with her very blue eyes, and her silence… Nobody has ever been able to say so much by saying nothing.
And that’s got me reaching for To The Lighthouse, which is well overdue a re-read.
Ellie
Thanks for bringing Light’s “Mrs Woolf and the Servants” to my attention Ellie. It had inexplicably passed me by (well, not entirely inexplicably: my LRB subscription has recently run out!)
I think moral blindspots are fascinating. And some great writers have had some very dodgy politics/views in their time! Modernism and fascism cosied-up more often than we like to remember, too. I think I might write something about this soon, but I won’t clog up your comments box with my notes and unformed thoughts right now …
To The Lighthouse is always overdue a re-read. Take the rest of the week off, and report back to us all on Monday!
I think you’re onto something very interesting there, Mark. I’ve actually just been re-reading our recent Rosamond Lehmann title ‘The Gipsy’s Baby’ for a forthcoming feature on this here blog, and the title story of the collection is, among other things, a very subtle and nuanced exploration of class divisions. Lehmann evokes, through her narrator, the same terror of the working classes expressed so often by Woolf, and yet here again was an educated woman who championed the underdog in many other respects.
Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. More of that in a subsequent post.
E x
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