Mrs Woolf and the Servants
by Alison Light
Fig Tree £20, pp376
In 1938, an unemployed weaver from Huddersfield called Agnes Smith wrote to Virginia Woolf in angry response to her book Three Guineas. She was scathing about the portrayal of the working class, writing that 'to hear some people talk you would think that ... a kitchen maid [was born] of a union between the cooking stove and the kitchen sink'.
This is the rebuke that none of Woolf's servants puts in writing; unlike the author, who scribbled furiously in private as well as in print, their voices are harder to reconstruct. A writer who attempted to put the hidden folds of consciousness on to paper none the less regarded her servants as functions relating to herself. Their clamorous demands and demurrals she found largely baffling and frustrating, and the resulting friction generated screeds of writing, much of so crazily personal a nature that they prompted Alison Light to explore this fraught psychic territory in a scintillating meeting of biography, social history and literary criticism.
Until at least the Second World War, British society ran on servants. Most British women, as Light explains, would either have been in service or employed servants. She approaches this subject through perhaps the most minutely examined psyche of British modernism. Although Woolf devoted hours to probing her own consciousness, those of her servants remained hazy to her: it's somehow symptomatic that Woolf always misspelled her cook's first name as 'Nelly', rather than the actual Nellie. Even though they were subject to terrible mental and emotional distress, Woolf dismissed her servants' fury or misery as hysterics, as if sensitivity only kicked in on a certain rung of the class structure. 'I am an individual,' Agnes Smith reproached her, 'as unique in my way as you are in yours.'
Light approaches her subject through Woolf's most piercing relationships with her servants. Sophie Farrell, a country girl 'brought up in the heartlands of deference', was a mainstay of Woolf's childhood and remained devoted to her. Lottie Hope, a volatile foundling child trained up into service, and Nellie Boxall were the servants of Woolf's maturity. Nellie in particular drove her mistress to despair and vice versa. Their rows and reconciliations were exhausting, however petty the catalogue of Things My Servant and I Argue About: a refusal to make marmalade; the heaviness of the coal scuttle. Woolf was convinced her servants were diddling her; each gossiped about the other. The real problem was one of two highly strung individuals at a period of gradual but decisive social change.
Reading Woolf on Nellie and, indeed, on the working class in general, it's easy to conclude that she was a cow to work for (prejudice, Light remarks, was her default mode, even though she picked at these prejudices in her fiction). But the Woolfs and their Bloomsbury pals were, in many ways, enlightened employers. Uniforms and subservient address were discarded; the demands of formal entertaining increasingly abandoned for jolly evenings with whisky and buns. Both in the domestic and political arena, Woolf loathed authority - her widower father's tyrannical rages remained with her - but running a household left her in a dilemma. She wanted the attentions of a servant without having to wield the authority of a mistress. As Light argues, it was considered a specifically female situation: the servant problem scrabbles at gender as well as class differences.
Light associates the unstable relationship of employer and servant with the equally fraught one of parent and child. She doesn't quite nail it, but it's clear that, for Woolf at least, the relationship was one that seeped beyond the borders of mere employment and into murkier waters. At the height of her rows with Nellie, she told her journal: 'I looked into her little shifting greedy eyes and saw nothing but malice and spite there ... she doesn't care for me.' This peculiar yowl of rejection certainly suggests that she craved something more than a job done well.
Woolf wasn't tutored in housework. Initially, cleaning the drawing room was prescribed as therapy while recovering from a breakdown ('It's really rather fun and makes a wonderful difference'), while her cookery classes were marred when she baked her wedding ring into a suet pudding. She later became more self-sufficient and spent the last morning before her suicide helping with the dusting. Even so, she relied on servants to protect her from her vulnerable body. Light delights in naming each queasy intimacy - slopping out chamber pots, cleaning the scum from the side of the bath - as if imagining Woolf's distaste. The writer confessed her inhibitions towards 'telling the truth about my own experiences as a body' and Light links her domestic difficulties with this physical squeamishness, her discontent as an embodied intellect. The life of the mind doesn't preclude physical needs, though it may, perhaps, be shamed by them. The nerve-scraping proximity of her servants was a continual reminder of the feeding, excreting, seeping body.
The Bloomsburies hoped to reshape British society. But, as Light bluntly states: 'There could never be a modernist domesticity with servants still in tow.' Although the Rodmell branch of the Labour party met in the Woolfs' drawing room, they employed half the members. Much of what Light describes would have seemed cobwebbed in anachronism until recently. Now that the British middle classes again decide that they need servants to help them function, this territory of shame and unease returns. Except that class unease may run alongside the otherness of race and nationality. Will artists who embody and anatomise these new shades of atavism squirm?
