Alison Light
Mrs. Woolf & the Servants: An Intimate History of Bloomsbury
Bloomsbury Press, 376 pages, $30.

An American economist, I think it was, once remarked that a single servant is worth a household full of appliances; in my experience, he was absolutely right. To be relieved of the tedium of looking after oneself, and of the day-to-day tasks that can make life such a trial and a bore, is to enter a state of near-bliss. One of the reasons that some of our polymathic ancestors were able to achieve so much was that they never had to do anything for themselves.

But there are also difficulties with servants. No man, said Napoleon, is a hero to his valet; and a servant is inclined to know more about you than you might wish him (or anyone else) to know. It is always a pleasure to discover that others have feet of clay; it is not so pleasurable to realize that others must have made the same discovery about you.

Virginia Woolf added a few complications of her own to the normal difficulties of the servant-master or -mistress relationship. She was that peculiarly emblematic type of our age, a person of advanced views and reactionary feeling. It is in fact very difficult to align harmoniously one’s emotional responses with one’s intellectual standpoint. Fervent democrats often despise most people; nationalists are appalled by the stupidity and backwardness of their fellow-countrymen; Communists are avid for money and exclusive privilege;