ANYONE WHO HAS eavesdropped on a couple of “ladies who lunch” bitching about their awful au pairs and careless cleaners will know that “the servant question” has never gone away. Locked in mutual dependency, the two sides struggle on – those childcare and cleaning experts surely sharing moans, both fair and unfair, about their employers.

It was ever thus. Despite her liberal outlook, Virginia Woolf’s shuddering distaste for the poor and the working class crops up again and again in her work. That her genius was to express simultaneously the density of the moment and the stillness of the inner life, that she also remains an inspiration to women continuing to question the influence of gender on destiny . . . none of that stops feelings of judgment when reading her private words about those who washed her clothes and made her meals. Although her prejudices about “the lower orders” were typical of her class and time, they still make for uncomfortable reading.

Why, she wondered, are “ordinary people . . . so repulsive in the mass”? In despair she questioned whether the relationship between “master and servant” must always be one of “deceit and distrust”. She rowed with her cook, made plots behind her back, then wrote: “I am sick of the timid, spiteful servant mind.” Her sister, Vanessa Bell, described her son Julian’s nurse as “uneducated and his inferior”. In December 1917, when her housemaid, Lottie Hope, asked for a rise, Virginia Woolf lashed out in her diary: “The poor have no chance; no manners or self-control to protect themselves with; we have a monopoly of all the generous feelings.” In fairness, the modern reader should remember that the upper classes could find the continual proximity of servants oppressive. You could have no secrets from them. “Good and faithful” they might be, but they could also run circles round you like Figaro. And they might just spit in your soup.

Alison Light’s inspired idea to approach Virginia Woolf from this angle – always honestly, never ungenerously – was inspired by Woolf herself. Writing about her cook, Nellie Boxall (a significant player in this book), in December 1929, she comments: “If I were reading this diary, if it were a book that came my way, I think I should seize on the portrait of Nelly [sic], and make a story – perhaps make the whole story revolve around that . . . Her character – our efforts to get rid of her – our reconciliations.”

Light (the granddaughter of a housemaid – as I am) makes her position clear: “My aim . . . was to give the servants back the dignity and respect they deserve.” She allows the women – cooks, maids, skivvies – who looked after the Stephens, Leonard and Virginia and the rest of her family (and sometimes friends) over years to step out of the shadows and reexamines the now-familiar details of Bloomsbury through this highly original prism. In doing so the historian offers us an invaluable glimpse into the hidden history of domestic service in an absorbing narrative, beautifully written with the sensibility of a poet.

Mrs Woolf and the Servants by Alison Light

Fig Tree, £20; 400pp

Buy the book here for the offer price of £18 (free p&p)

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