Woolf's servants get their due

ALISON LIGHT

Virginia Woolf spent her last morning with her maid, dusting. This telling detail is one of many that make Alison Light's "Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury," so lively and so revealing. Here Woolf's servants emerge from below stairs and Woolf herself is freshly - and compassionately - illuminated.

Alison Light, the author of "Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars," teaches at the University of East London and Newcastle University. She spoke from her home in London.

Q. How did you become interested in Woolf's servants?
A. By reading Woolf's diaries, which I love, but which contain appalling references to the servants: Lottie Hope or Nellie Boxall being compared to animals and vermin. Woolf's disgust riveted me. I also wondered why she and Boxall had such rows. Then the fact that my grandmother was in service and my mother's sisters started out in service before the Second World War.

Q. Where did you find the details of Lottie's life, Nellie's life?
A. I tracked down birth and death dates, went to their birthplaces, advertised in local newspapers. Then I came across Edith Sichel, Lottie Hope's benefactor and a substantial figure in Victorian philanthropy, and I studied the records of all those "deserted children." Totally heartbreaking. Suddenly Lottie became a person with a surname, a child "trained up" for domestic service like millions of others, who lived hand to mouth her whole life. When a relative of Nellie Boxall's contacted me, the focus shifted from literary criticism to biography to social history. But I don't pretend to fill in the gaps in these lives, nor did I want to.

Q.Did your opinion of Woolf change as you wrote?
A. I admired her no less by the end of this book and in some ways I admired her more because she grappled with things that were personally very painful. She was writing against the grain for herself in her diaries; working women were an alien species. But unlike her sister, Vanessa Bell, who was remote from the servants, Virginia's history of illness gave her an insight into what it was like to be treated like a child.

Q. Did Woolf create working-class characters?
A. It's interesting how often she did and then penciled them out. In "The Waves," for example, she wanted to have "proletarian voices" but found that she was simply ventriloquizing. Her creations turned into parodies as they did in so much fiction of the period. She was stuck: If she included such characters, she felt she was going beyond her social reach; but if she excluded them, she was clearly writing within a very narrow ambit. The servants she did include were Victorian, hugely idealized.

Q. Did servants profit from their employers' status?
A. One of the great myths about service is that servants could marry above their station and ascend the social scale. In fact, most barely edged up into the lower middle class. If they saved money, they didn't get married or they married late. You weren't going to get far being a servant, but there was a lot of borrowed glamour. Sophie Farrell was very poignant to me when I discovered that she ended up living in a tiny terraced house shared with a former housemaid and hankering after her former life with these grand people.

Q. Was 1945 a watershed?
A. I wish I had had the energy and knowledge to extend the story into the present, because, of course, this didn't end in 1945, although live-in service for the majority of middle-class households did. (My terraced house in North London is a little bigger than the one that Sophie Powell ended up in, yet there are two tiny bedrooms at the top for live-in servants.) That idea of having a cook/housemaid was gone.

Q. What were the after-effects?
A. An important point to me is how service structured this thing we call class, which is such an unfashionable term today. If we don't take domestic service seriously we can't understand why the British continue to have surly, belligerent feelings about doing things for each other. That deep history of deference has a lot to do with service.

Q. And with the history of women in Britain?
A. Of half the population. It's what children grew up with, either because their mother was the servant or because they had servants.

Q. But now the Woolf servants get their due, in print at least?
A. I hope so. I'm putting the research papers into the archives of the University of Sussex and I have contributed the life of Nellie Boxall to the "Dictionary of National Biography." It's nice to think of Leslie Stephen's [Virginia's father's] old monster, the DNB, finally having the cook in there.

Anna Mundow, a freelance journalist living in Central Massachusetts, is a correspondent for the Irish Times. She can be reached by e-mail at ama1668@hotmail.com.