MOP & PAIL

LUCYLETHBRIDGE

UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS

MRS WOOLFANDTHESERVANTS: THE HIDDENHEARTOFDOMESTICSERVICE

★By Alison Light (Fig Tree 376pp £20)

FORTHECHILDRENof Leslie Stephen, growing up in the late nineteenth century in their large house in Hyde Park Gate, servants were inevitable cogs in the complex social and practical machinery of the upper-middle-class home. Lighting fires, producing meals, cleaning and polishing, their work was for the most part as intensive and back-breaking as it had been for their predecessors. Leslie Stephen considered installing new-fangled running hot water – but decided that having servants heat it and then laboriously carry it upstairs was the cheaper course. Yet by the standards of their age, the Stephens were enlightened employers. Julia Stephen was one of the ‘slummers’, that band of women who devoted much time to visiting and helping fallen women or the poor and other philanthropic projects. They were fond enough of their servants to take photographs of them. But while her aunt Julia Margaret Cameron photographed the young Mrs Stephen in the pose of a heavylidded Madonna, the model of the Victorian ideal of ethereal womanhood, a photograph of their cook Sophie Farrell, with her stout, aproned frame and thick labourer’s forearms, portrayed her as the ideal cook (if there were such a thing), her destiny to be nothing else. When the elder Stephens died, Sophie came with Virginia and her siblings as they made their first foray into Bloomsbury. They found a house in Gordon Square. ‘Sophie approves of it in every particular’, wrote Virginia. There, they resolved that all would be different, that fresh air would blow through the stuffed and buttoned Victorian drawing rooms of the previous generation. Conversation and creative study would form the timetable, there would be jazzily printed curtains, and they would have whisky at teatime. But down in the basement, to facilitate this Utopia, Sophie still toiled, with just one housemaid to help her. Fires had to be lit; meals, however casual and erratic, had to be produced; and there was still

Sophie Farrell

no running hot water. On the whole, the servants of the Woolfs and Bells stayed, and in fact often moved between households within the Bloomsbury set. They even, imitating the exclusive world of their employers, referred to themselves as the ‘click’. After Sophie, there was Nellie Boxall, the Woolfs’ recalcitrant cook; the housemaid Lottie Hope, raised in an institute for foundlings, with her crimson lipstick and her black bobbed head ‘like a disarranged dahlia’; the five Selwood sisters; Grace Higgens; and Louie Everest, who stayed loyal until Leonard Woolf’s death in 1969. Alison Light has done an extraordinarily impressive job in unearthing the individual histories of those who left few letters and no diaries, and whose births and childhoods were barely recorded. At the heart of her book, however, is the vexed relationship between Virginia Woolf herself and the women who made possible a domestic life that she found both alluring and abhorrent, and through this Light examines the great domestic changes of twentieth-century Britain. Virginia Woolf was fascinated and repelled by her servants. She felt guilty about them and yet she despised them for in many cases embodying characteristics that she found repellent: respectability, gentility, conservatism, garrulity and fleshliness. She was curious about them – her diaries and letters are full of observations of Lottie and Nellie – and yet she couldn’t bring herself to see them fully as individuals, preferring instead to rail against what she called ‘the servant mind’. With Nellie Boxall in particular, she had a relationship that at times reduced both of them to tears. They rowed like lovers, Nellie wielding a metaphorical rolling pin and threatening regularly to hand in her notice, Virginia wilting at the horror and complicatedness of it all. There was simultaneously an intimacy and distance in the relationship between servant and employer that was profoundly disquieting to Woolf and to many others of her generation. Woolf tried to untie the knots: ‘Why is there always this relationship between master and servant. Always deceit and disgust. Our transition age perhaps.’ She was right about the changes of a new century; like many of her class and age, despite the efforts she had made to unfetter herself from convention, she was caught between two generations. She wanted light and air and cordiality between Nellie and herself, but she also wanted obedience and deference. Even the spare and unencumbered delights of

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LITERARY REVIEW August 2007