Virginia Woolf Miscellany 2009 REVIEW:
MRS. WOOLF AND THE SERVANTS: AN INTIMATE HISTORY OF DOMESTIC LIFE IN BLOOMSBURY
by Alison Light. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008.
358 pages. $30 cloth. $20 paper.
“It is much to be regretted that no lives of maids, from which a more fully documented account could be constructed, are to be found in the Dictionary of National Biography“ (Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, 1939: Chapter 2, footnote 36).
Until Alison’s Light’s book, Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury, most critics sympathetic to Woolf would sweep her views of servants under the carpet. Or deny their importance to understanding the literary work of modernism. But since the rise of the new historicism and cultural studies, information about the obscure lives of servants and Woolf’s views have been framed in terms of social change and power relations—“on or about December 1910 human nature changed”—signaling the rise of the cook and the maid.
Light’s interest in the topic of servants was piqued when she found Woolf’s diaries full of vicious remarks about her cook, Nellie Boxall, who lived with Leonard and Virginia Woolf for eighteen years, 1916-1934, despite frequent squabbles. It was a story, as Light said, “of mutual–and unequal–dependence” (xiv), but also about social differences and class feeling. How, she asks, do we align Woolf’s public sympathy with the lives of obscure women with her “private recoil” (203)? As Raymond Williams observes, those in Bloomsbury, like Virginia Woolf “were a true fraction of the existing English upper class. They were at once against its dominant ideas and values and still willingly, in all immediate ways, part of it. It is a very complex and delicate position….” (Williams, 236).
In this absorbing study, which weaves fiction, literary criticism and social history–reaching poetry, at times–Light illuminates not only the personal lives of servants working in Bloomsbury but the cultural history of servants in England between the wars. She offers fascinating information about domestic service that was largest single female occupation in England until 1945, orphans and charity girls being a large part of service.
The aim of the book is moral re-dress: “to give the servants back their dignity and the respect they deserve” (xvii). It is organized into four sections each focusing on the life of a particular servant in the context of Bloomsbury and the social history of domestics in England: Chapter 1 focuses on Sophie Farrell, “The Family Treasure,” who joined the Stephen family in 1886 when Woolf was four years old. She served for fifty years, knew Woolf’s mother and was a valued link with the past; Chapter 2, “Housemaid’s Souls,” is the story of Miss Sichel, a do-gooder, and the foundling, Lottie Hope, who became Woolf’s parlourmaid for about thirty years; Chapter 3, “The Question of Nellie” narrates the life of Nellie Boxall who served the Woolfs for eighteen years. Her altercations with them about her difficult domestic work, sometimes without water or electricity and dealing with unsavory sanitary conditions is described; Chapter 4, “Memoirs of a Lavatory Attendant,” deals with Woolf’s speculations about the life of a lavatory attendant, the shift in role illustrating how women who were once servants moved into the professions in the 1930s with the increasing democratization of British society.
In the context of British attitudes toward servants, Bloomsbury distinguished itself somewhat. Distinctions must be made and contradictions noted. Some, notably Leonard Woolf, were declared socialists with progressive social views; others in the group had feminist sympathies or held egalitarian principles. Virginia Woolf relates to her lower-class servants as “a matter of conscience: not in solidarity, nor in affiliation” (Williams 236). She benefited from their service yet blamed the “system” and her parents’ generation for creating it in her Diary. Like many of the female writers that Tillie Olsen highlights in Silences, she depended on other women to cook and clean so that she could write. Women’s independence was a plank in her platform of life and aesthetics but, as Light notes, it was Nellie who drew the curtains and cleaned the chamber pots.
Care giving, even today, is a complex relationship. There were times when Woolf was ill and needed a great deal of care. When Lottie Hope and Nellie Boxall arrived from Durbins in Feb. 1916…. Nellie was twenty-five and Lottie a year younger; their mistress ten years their senior but clearly still needing a great deal of care….The household revolved around the routines which made it possible for her to write and keep her mental equilibrium; regular meals, a rest after lunch, not too many visitors, no late nights. (134) Yet in later, healthier times, Woolf chafed at the presence of servants, particularly Nellie, debating the “cost”:
It is an absurdity, how much time L. & I have wasted in talking about servants. And it can never be done with because the fault lies in the system. How can an uneducated woman let herself in, alone, into our lives?—what happens is that she becomes a mongrel; and has no roots any where. (176)
Embarrassing racial overtones of half-breed and rubbish hover over Woolf’s inner struggle about integrating a servant of a different class into her and Leonard’s daily life.
Light asserts that the figure of the obscure workingwoman “haunts Woolf’s experiments in literary modernism” (xx). It is a social and literary issue that persists today as Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn assert in their new book, Half the Sky. Western feminism, they claim, is haunted by the struggle for gender equality in the developing world. We observe this directly as nannies from Bhutan, Nepal and the Caribbean enter into service with Western families.
But what were the literary consequences of Woolf’s attitude toward servants? Is it true that Woolf’s lack of knowledge about the physical and inner lives of working women (that she acknowledges) and her shadowy representations “set a limit” (xx) to what she could achieve in her fiction, as Light asserts? Never one to proselytize about the “servant question” in art, she nevertheless presents a powerful, sympathetic and, sometimes, comic, literary image of a servant in Mrs. McNab in To the Lighthouse. For as Woolf notes in “Mr.Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” “on or about 1910,” the Georgian cook emerged like a Leviathan, the aroused mythical sea monster, into the drawing room and into middle-class Victorian consciousness. This was a consciousness reflected in Woolf’s honest and frequent examination of her feelings toward servants—unusual for her time—in her Diary. Apocalyptic images haunt the Time Passes section of her novel—like the Leviathan or blood, darkness, storm and fire—and suggest but never detail the actual lives and rebellion of the working class, the servants or miners. Mrs. McNab will emerge from the darkness of the Victorian house, end her “waiting” on others, and choose the new post-war options of education and access to factory work, waitress, chambermaid, florist, and beautician positions. New opportunities, household appliances and attitudes toward class, family, the education of women and domestic work would alter her role.
Since “the imagination is largely the child of the flesh,” Woolf acknowledges that she cannot embody the knowledge or capture the inner life of working women in her writing: “because one’s body had never stood at the wash-tub; one’s hands had never wrung and scrubbed.” (LWKI, xxi). And so she does not come to a conclusion about “the true nature of women,” in general, and working-class women, in particular (AROO, 6). She does not risk patronizing or romanticizing them. They remain shadowy or blank as a kind of moral challenge to the reader, a reminder of the suffering beings not yet culturally or psychologically known or realized in life or fiction.
Patricia Laurence
Brooklyn College
Works Cited
Kristof, Nicholas D. & Sheryl WuDunn. Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into
Opportunity for Women Worldwide. New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2009.
Olsen, Tillie. Silences. New York: Delacorte Press, 1978.
Williams, Raymond. The Raymond Williams Reader, Ed. John Higgins. Oxford &
Malden: Blackwell, 2001.
Woolf, Virginia. Life as We Have Known It, Introductory Letter. By Cooperative
Working Women. Ed. Margaret Llewelyn Davies. London: Hogarth Press, 1931.
—–. A Room of One’s Own, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1929.
—–. To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1927.
