While visiting Helmsley Walled Garden, within the grounds of the castle, I was lucky enough to find MRS WOOLF AND THE SERVANTS by Alison Light, published in 2007, on the second-hand book shelves.
A single
scan of the book’s main headings drew me in: The Family Treasure; Housemaid’s
Souls; The Question of Nelly and The Lavatory Attendant. Each is followed by a pair
of names, one the famous writer and the other a domestic servant. Light’s Bloomsbury servants get almost equal
billing with the famous social set.
Light
begins by pointing out that in the great Bloomsbury
archives, there is little evidence of the other women who were part of households, the ones who “lived-in”, though far
less comfortably, the same walls. Yet the free, independent and creative
lives of Virginia the writer and Vanessa Bell the artist depended on the servants
who worked for them: in other words, on other women not being free.
Despite
the silent archive, Alison Light noticed how frequently Virginia, Leonard and their
circle wrote about their servants in their letters and diaries, and so she set out
to discover these missing women. Light writes about three servants in
particular: Sophie Farrell, who had first worked for Virginia’s beloved mother, charity-case
Lottie Hope and the cook Nellie Boxall. She shows a pattern where servants often stayed for many years, although they were passed between members of the wider family as need or
as tempers suggested, and poaching of prized servants was often attempted.
The book
is a pleasingly thorough inquiry, sharpened by having the viewpoint of someone
whose own mother was in service. Light read unpublished letters and documents, visited houses and places where the
servants had worked and interviewed descendants and local historians. She
looked into their childhood homes, their education, the changing patterns of
their employment and at the practical and emotional relationships that
existed between a mistress and servant sharing the same roof year after year.
I did enjoy the variety within this book. Thoughtfully
written, each section opens with a long passage of Woolfian lyrical prose which contrasts well with Light’s brisker
accounts of a world where long hours, the collecting of chamber-pots, the
carrying of coal-buckets, the lack of hot water taps, the management of unreliable
ovens, and days spent in dank basements or cold bedrooms were a constant part
of the servants life. Incidentally, she makes it clear that the wealthy rarely
saw any need for new labour-saving devices or domestic improvements: they
already had household servants saving them labour.
As the
new century progressed, the distant mistress and servant relationship was harder to
maintain. Back in 1892, Vanessa and Virginia’s childhood home, 22 Hyde Park Gate
in Kensington, had been an elegant five-storied mansion where the servants
slept in the spaces under the eaves or lived down in the basement.
Almost
two decades later, when Virginia and Leonard Woolf were running their small
printing press at Hogarth House and Vanessa and Duncan Grant lived a paint-spattered
bohemian existence at Charleston farmhouse in Sussex, there was only a wall marking the distance between the rooms
of mistress and servant .
Through several different lives, including glimpses of the Bloomsbury "stars", Alison Light brings in topics as diverse as the popular habit
of “poor-visiting”, agricultural changes, the development of the kitchen and celebrity
cooking for Charles Laughton. She looks at Virginia’s troubled life both as a feminist
writer trying to develop a new style of writing and as an independent woman
whose mental health forces her into dependence on her servants. Her own worst
instincts often flare out against the servants but they seem to have a
way of responding: an uneasy relationship that cannot have been calm.
Furthermore,
national events, such as the outbreak of war in 1914, epidemics, the growth of factory
work for women, female education and emancipation, new taxes and economic
depression brought on more social change. The ideal of “service” no longer fitted
the modern world with its increasing demand for equality for all, and the
Woolfs – and their servants – had to change along with it. Even so, I wonder
how easily discussions went at the Labour party meetings at Rodmell House, which
included the Woolf’s servants and employees among its members.
MRS WOOLF
AND THE SERVANTS by Alison Light was a useful if sometimes uncomfortable book
to read. I enjoyed it because, from a writing point of view, one has to
consider the role of any servants “attending” to a story set in the past, as
appropriate to the time and place.
Are the servants to be included or
not, named or not? Are the servants who
live closely with the family, like the Sterkarms in Susan Price’s historical
sci-fi novels? Or are they hired servants and bearers, as in Sue Purkiss’s Jack
Fortune and the Hidden
Valley adventure?
Or are they invisible, with the
place run, like Nampara on screen in Poldark, with barely a servant evident? Or
would they be no more worth mentioning than a washing machine in a modern
house? I suppose it all depends on when: different times have brought different
relationships, and that is maybe what I need to think about for the work in
progress.
Moreover,
reading MRS WOOLF AND THE SERVANTS rather makes one think about celebrity and other households and the kinds of domestic help and helpers that are needed today.
Penny
Dolan
3 comments:
Thanks for this, Penny - I'm off to get a copy - sounds like a fascinating read!
You know, I've had this on my shelves for over a decade and STILL haven't read it... You've inspired to dust it down and open it up - thankyou!
Thanks, Joan and Claire!
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