Mrs. Woolf Goes Below Stairs

Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury. By Alison Light. 362 pp. Bloomsbury Press. $30.00.
Just when you thought there is no more to say about Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury, along comes Light with a new slant on the subject, except this time it’s below stairs in the spotlight. It’s obvious enough if one thinks about it—especially if one is female--that Woolf’s writing life was made possible by the women who emptied her chamber pot, mended her clothes and cooked her meals. It was their labors that allowed her to shut the door on the rooms of her own to produce such masterpieces as Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, to name my two favorites.
Light looks at Woolf’s often uneasy relations with her servants from both a social and a literary perspective. She has unearthed some interesting material about these women, such as Sophie Farrell, who worked for Virginia’s parents and who remained in the family until 1931. Woolf was a woman of her time, and however advanced she may have sounded in print, she and her husband Leonard—an avowed socialist—often treated their servants as lesser beings, as a barely tolerated necessity. Although Light points out the sometimes disconcerting disconnect between the political opinions of both Woolfs, she allows that neither can be blamed for being creatures of their time, an era when few regarded their household staff as social equals. Light also correlates Woolf’s over-fastidious reaction to bodily needs and her sometimes appalling attitude towards the lower classes as smelly and worse, a perspective that surfaces in her fiction and non-fiction alike.
Ultimately, as Claire Messud, a novelist herself, points out in a perceptive review in The New York Times Book Review (10/19/08), “we must be grateful that Virginia had the good fortune to have help” because her emotional condition was such that “she would have written little without it.” Thus it boils down to the eternal trade-off, especially for women artists; does one stick to one’s principles and get little done, or accept help and live with the guilt?