From Bloomsbury, a drudge report

An example from Alison Light's ''Mrs. Woolf and the Servants'' of a life transformed by service, titled ''A Girl Before and After Reclamation.'' (''Mrs. Woolf and the Servants'')

Over the years I have given assorted thought to the servant question. When my mother married, she believed she was embarking on the life of the mind and assumed through some outlandish logic that she would soon have the wherewithal to employ one or two excellent creatures to take care of housework and childcare: a vain expectation that blighted all our lives. To be sure, there was a series of women who came in to "do" for her on and off over the years when there was any money at all, but they were human beings, flawed and idiosyncratic, not the priceless treasures she had in mind. ("After months of instructions of how to cut the pound of butter to fit the butter plate," she wrote to a friend about the current "girl," "we were presented with a shape so inappropriate, unartistic, and difficult to achieve besides, that Jim said, 'Nothing means anything anymore. God Himself is writing it.' ")

The servant question is one of the great problematic aspects of modern life because, economics aside, having servants - to say nothing of being one - clashes with modern ideas of equality, independence, and privacy. I don't think there could be a better illustration of the way the contradictions played out than in the life of Virginia Woolf. I gain this view from Alison Light's "Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury" (Bloomsbury, $30). This is a book with a most revelatory subject, but a book, alas, in great need of a further rewrite to set the chronology straight, eliminate irrelevant information, and stifle the dull, off-kilter editorializing. Still, it is original, and that is a lot.

The whole point of the Bloomsberries, as we like to call them, was their determination to break out of the claustrophobic prison, as they saw it, of the Victorian way of life and thought. Everything must go: earnestness, rectitude, piety, prudishness, and all that stuffiness about what is done and not done. The Victorian home, a gloomy, cluttered, dusty-draped nest of unwholesome emotions and hypocrisy, was to be purged and stripped down, aired out and opened to the light. And a great deal of what was lamented there - tyranny, subservience, oppressive conventions and rituals, the heavy press of domesticity - was seen to be embodied in the institution of domestic service. Though servants were essential to the running of the labor-intensive middle- and upper-middle-class Victorian home, it was fondly imagined that they could be dispensed with in the modern one. The ideal was a new form of domestic establishment, one which Woolf summed up as "entirely controlled by one woman, a vacuum cleaner, & electric stoves."

Light shows that Woolf had a particular horror of servants. They "made everything pompous and heavy-footed," she complained. "Why we have them, I can't think." Her aversion drew its rationale from her liberated, anti-Victorian social views but gained its intensity from her own psyche. In the first place, servants' work, the grossness of it, the stoking and hauling and emptying, resonated with her own disgust for the human body and concomitant desire to be released from material encumbrance. Furthermore, she, who longed for independence, freedom, and privacy to pursue her writing, felt the presence of a servant intrusive and suffocating. To notice a servant in this way is a modern phenomenon; for without an insulating belief in traditional hierarchy everyone's consciousness is underfoot with servants suddenly taking up psychic space. Having a servant around imposed, in her view, a repugnant relationship of intimacy with a being who was inferior spiritually and mentally ("a human mind wriggling undressed").

In this way, Woolf's toxic snobbery is actually of a piece with her rejection of tradition. Her most terrible vexations - and some of her most unlovely sentiments - came out of her relationship with the cook and general factotum, Nellie Boxall, whom she tried to dismiss countless times in 18 years. "I looked into her little shifting greedy eyes," she wrote in her diary, "& saw nothing but malice & spite there, & felt that that had come to be the reality now: she doesn't care for me, or for anything: has been eaten up by her poor timid servants fears & cares & respectabilities."

At times Woolf acknowledged that a servant's predicament, that of being utterly dependent on the will of another, was appalling. It was, in fact, her own nightmare, though it seems that it was the spectacle rather than the reality that upset her. She did not identify with a servant's actual lot and was furious, for instance, when Nellie ordered her, Virginia Woolf, author of "A Room of One's Own," out of her, Nellie's, room. That led to yet another failed dismissal. Put simply, Woolf construed what she disliked in her servants - their lack of cultivation and easiness, their obsequiousness and craving for respectability - as being matters of character rather than station.

The confounding of the prejudice that servants are base and ignorant is a tried and true routine in popular literature. As I write, "L'élégance du hérisson" by Muriel Barbery has been a French bestseller for 99 weeks, and now comes to us in an English translation as "The Elegance of the Hedgehog" (translated by Alison Anderson, Europa, paperback, $15). The book is a Cinderella tale with a would-be philosophical bent and an exceedingly worthy message. It is written in part as the journal of Paloma, a precocious - some might say unbearably so - 12-year-old girl, and in part as the musings of Renée, a dumpy 54-year-old concierge of an upscale Paris apartment building. Renée has gone out of her way to put up a front of lumpish stupidity so she can just get on with reading literature, great and small, listening to music, and otherwise cultivating her mind. Nothing of the "human mind wriggling undressed" here.

Most of the building's stereotypically horrid, rich, self-involved residents are taken in by Renée's camouflage, but not little Paloma, and not the new resident, a Japanese gentleman with exquisite taste. What is meant to be an unlikely friendship springs up - followed by a new hairstyle, some elegant clothes, and voila! as you might say, romance is in the cards. We know by the conventions of idealistic fantasy - to which this book is entirely obedient - that all must end in love eternal or noble death. I leave it to you to care which one it is.

Katherine A. Powers lives in Cambridge. Her column appears on alternate Sundays. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@verizon.net.