I've read a couple early reviews of the new book Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury, by Alison Light, which explores Virginia Woolf's relationships with the workers who kept her and her households cleaned, fed and so on from childhood on, and the contradictions between these relationships and Woolf's generally progressive views on social questions. It's a great idea, examining class relations in Woolf's own life and the lives of her literary circle, and this sounds like an interesting book.
So when I saw another review of it, a full-page one by the novelist Claire Messud in the October 19 New York Times Book Review, I settled down with a cup of coffee to read it. And it's not bad in the not-bad standard NYTBR format, which always reminds me of the book reports we gave in grade school that basically consisted of synopses of the book rather than any sort of literary critique or analysis. Hey, we were 10. I don't know what the NYTBR's reviewers' excuse is. The saving grace, though, is that since there's no way I'll ever get the time to read many of these books, these blandly informative reviews that digest and regurgitate the main points do provide a service of sorts. In this case, for instance, thanks to this review, I now know the names and vital statistics of Sophie Farrell, Nellie Boxall and Lottie Hope, three of the central figures of Light's book, as well as the crucial issues involved in the dynamic between them and Woolf. So cool. Book review as Cliff's Notes.
Then there's this, right toward the end: "But as anyone who has been or had a cleaner or a baby sitter knows, the tensions, the concern and responsibility, the emotional involvement, are not unique to Woolf or to Bloomsbury; they are the near-inevitable stuff of women's lives to this day." Hmm. Perhaps I shouldn't assume that the women's lives referred to after the semicolon aren't those pre-semicolon folks who have been, that is, the workers, but only those who have had, that is, the employers of the household workers. But I do, especially given the sentence's construction that contrasts today's women's lives to Woolf and Bloomsbury. So. I'm not a great one for irony but here we have a hearty dose, even if unintentional. A full page about the class relations of prosperous writers and their servants, about bringing those relations to light, concluding with a clueless conflation of all women with the nanny-reliant set the NYTBR is written by and for.
Update: I just listened to this brief recording, via the BBC (link thanks to Laila Lalami's blog), of Virginia Woolf speaking about words. Good golly, if her accent doesn't say it all about class my name is Margaret Dumont!
