Mrs Woolf and the Servants

Alison Light

Creativity and those who make it possible - examined by one of today's most interesting British cultural historians

Loathing, anger, shame - and deep affection: Virginia Woolf's relationship with her servants was central to her life. It provokes some of the most vicious and candid passages in her diary and finds its way into all of her writing. Telling the story of the women who worked for Virginia Woolf, Mrs Woolf and the Servants explores the volatile, emotional territory which is the hidden history of domestic service. Moving imaginatively between real lives, fiction and fantasy, it retrieves the lives of women who have been relegated to the margins of history and casts a new light on one of Britain's greatest literary modernists.

Alison Light is the author of Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars and edited Virginia Woolf's Flush for Penguin Classics. She has worked at the BBC and lectured at London University. She is currently a Visiting Professor at the University of East London and also teaches in the English department at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. She writes regularly for the London Review of Books. Her grandmother worked as a domestic servant.