Rosemary Hill writes:

The uneasy balance of power between domestic servants and their masters and mistresses, especially mistresses, is the theme of Alison Light's study of the home life of Virginia Woolf, whose complicated relationship with her own cook, Nellie Boxall, involved a degree of intimidation on both sides. The sight of Virginia and Leonard pacing the squares of Bloomsbury, well out of earshot, anxiously discussing what to do about Nellie is one of many moments when Light lets us see them, as the servants did, from unexpected and sometimes undignified angles. Her contention that Woolf's relationship with Nellie was one of the most important and reluctantly intimate of her life is borne out by the index of the volume of Woolf's Diary for 1920-24, where the entries under 'Boxall, Nelly' (Woolf consistently misspelled her name) are as numerous as those for 'Carrington, Dora'.

(LRB 19 July 2007)

Fig Tree | hardback 376 pp. |ISBN: 9780670867172