Rating: Four stars

“I was truly amazed by how many women came up to me and said their mother or grandmother or older sister had been a servant, and they'd never felt able to talk about it,” says Mrs. Woolf and the Servants author Alison Light. “I was stunned by that. It's still not talked about, or written about, or filmed much.”

     As an English novelist and essayist, Virginia Woolf is considered one of the foremost modernist literary figures. Woolf committed suicide by drowning in 1941 after her London homes were destroyed during the Blitz. Playwright Edward Albee later got permission from her husband to use her name in the title of his play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

     Mrs. Woolf and the Servants is not just about Woolf’s relationship with her servants, it's about the Victorian legacy of servant and employer. It's how people felt and still feel about serving others. Woolf had a love-hate relationship with her servants. She didn’t want them around, but she needed them. Like many women of her class in the post-Victorian Age, Woolf had no housewifely skills.

     “People said I'm glad you wrote this because my grandmother hated being a servant and could never talk about it,” says Light. “Or, my grandmother loved being a servant but could never talk about it. There are very complicated feelings that run deep in British society about serving other people. A feeling of shame, of being treated as though you were stupid.”

     “I was reading the Virginia Wolfe diaries where she was fantastically rude about her servants and said some grim things, some of which I quote in the book," says Light. “I found that completely riveting because I'd been reading her as a feminist, someone who supported women and wrote in support of women. The contrast in how she writes in her essays and how she writes privately about the women in her household, that's what gave me the idea. The other is because my grandmother was a domestic servant. I grew up with those stories.”

     Alison Light is working on her third book. She’s also a journalist and has written volumes of essays. Light was born in Portsmouth and is moving from London to Oxford.

     Light does a great job not judging Woolf for how she behaved. Nor does she judge the servants. There are a few times when the text gets dry or feels repetitive. Light says she wrote the book in a way to combine scholarly and popular appeal, that those sections can easily be skipped over. You get a clear picture of what life was like in an upper middle class home…as well as a Bohemian household.

Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury. By Alison Light. Hardcover, 400 pages, Publisher: Bloomsbury Press (September 2, 2008), Language: English, ISBN: 9781596915602 $30.00