Inspiring Older Readers
Mrs Woolf & the Servants by Alison Light
Virginia Woolf came from a grand intellectual family. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a critic, historian and man of letters, the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. His first wife was a daughter of William Thackeray, the novelist. His second wife, Julia, Virginia Woolf’s mother, came from an equally grand Anglo-Indian family, having been born in Calcutta, Bengal, then the capital of British rule in the Raj. Sir Leslie was also Julia’s second marriage: her first husband had been Herbert Duckworth, a barrister from Somerset landed gentry.
The family home at 22 Hyde Park Gate was a classic Victorian patriarchy, an ‘establishment’ conducted with every propriety in a sprawling five-story London townhouse, its smooth, late-Victorian operation dependent on a substantial domestic staff. Servants were as essential to the day-to-day requirements of such a family – kitchen and scullery duties, serving meals, scouring baths and toilets and chamber pots – as they were to its social and even moral status. (Although there was also a blunt consideration of economy: for upper class families this was a time when the labour of domestic servants was cheaper than the expense involved in modernising a house so that it would include more efficient kitchen appliances, central heating and running hot water.)
22 Hyde Park Gate was home to the offspring of these three marriages and Woolf referred to it as an ‘entire republic’ rather than a family, a microcosm of Victorian society. That she was sexually abused by her two step-brothers is now widely understood, although only since the mid-70s, when her unfinished autobiographical sketches were first published (as Moments of Being, which is reviewed here on Letterpress).
Woolf’s generation, Virginia believed, had inherited a decaying, collapsing Victorian social order which left people like her deskilled, incapable and dependent on domestic labour while offering no new, more egalitarian model for the mistress-and-servant relationship fit for the new century.
I know of only one book that explores this huge and complex topic in depth, and that is Alison Light’s 2007 study, Mrs Woolf & the Servants, an innovative and ambitious book that mixes literary biography, social history and the reclaimed ‘hidden histories’ and unheard voices of a particular section of the working class. It is erudite, elegantly written, assured, superbly researched, and fascinating. (In all these qualities, it bears some similarities, I think, to the work of Light’s late husband, Raphael Samuel, the Marxist historian and scholar whose The Lost World of British Communism is reviewed here on Letterpress.)
We now know from Woolf’s diaries and letters that her relationship with domestic staff – indeed, with the ‘lower orders’ – was deeply troubled. In fact, in some sections of her journals, and certainly in her letters to her sister Vanessa Bell (letters in which she was at her most frank and sometimes deliberately shocking), the vagaries of servants, the loss of privacy due to their continual presence, the responsibilities of employing staff and the impossibility of finding dependable ‘girls’, are the dominant subjects.
Woolf’s prejudices – and they are numerous – were never hidden, at least in the more ‘private’ writings of her diaries and letters, but she worried away at these aspects of her own psyche as one might return over and over to pick at a troublesome scab, for she found such views shameful, while at the same time, it seems, being unable to moderate or change them. And at times, her excoriating views of the ‘lower orders’ reflect a queasy disgust with her own physical (and mental) infirmities, the shame of human appetites, and of course guilt that her most inwardly held attitudes did not match the increasingly ‘progressive’ milieu of her own relationships (especially following her marriage to Leonard Woolf) and the socialist, Fabian, philanthropic and Labour and co-operative movement circles in which they moved.
This is one of those books that I am profoundly glad to have read but am unlikely to reread. I have taken from it what I need to know and it will now always inform my understanding of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group more generally. It is even more revealing than Woolf’s own autobiographical writings. It isn’t light reading, exactly, but it is accessible and enjoyable and anyone with an interest in Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group or late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century social history will find it deeply informative and thought-provoking. And perhaps most importantly, Light’s superb analysis gives back to the servants on whom Bloomsbury depended the identities that history so casually stripped them of.
Mrs Woolf & the Servants is available from Penguin but there are plenty of cheap secondhand copies around in both hardback and paperback.
Alun Severn
March 2020
Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury elsewhere on Letterpress
The Death of the Moth & Other Essays by Virginia Woolf
Orlando: A biography by Virginia Woolf
A Boy At The Hogarth Press by Richard Kennedy
Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers : The Hogarth Press 1917-1941 by J.H. Willis Jnr
Moments of Being by Virginia Woolf