Mrs. Woolf and the Servants

July 7, 2008
Virginia Woolf is a feminist icon, and her husband, Leonard, was a committed socialist and supporter of workers’ rights. Yet, says Light, in this fresh take on Bloomsbury, the couple perpetuated the class system by paying a pittance to their charwoman. In her attempt to restore the servants to the Bloomsbury story, Light also ruminates about whether the dependence of Woolf and her sister, Vanessa Bell, on their assorted live-in maids and cooks plays havoc with the idealized image of them as “bohemian, free women creating a new kind of life.” Light also dissects Woolf’s fictional servants as a window into contemporary social class prejudices and delves into the personal histories of Woolf’s servants in context with their peers. British scholar Light (Forever England
), the granddaughter of a live-in domestic, often seems to be pushing a personal agenda, and her insistence that without the hard work of the servants there would have been no Bloomsbury is unconvincing, yet her analyses of both the Bloomsbury notables and the servant class of their time are deft and engrossing. Illus.