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Having just written and performed a play about a severely-abused, nineteenth-century, domestic servant, I was intrigued to discover that a book has been written about Virginia Woolf's relationship to the women who cooked and cleaned in her various homes. The book is Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury by Alison Light.

Before I talk about my responses to this remarkable book, I want to explain what I was trying to do with my play about the servant--which, by the way, is titled Lace Curtain Irish. It's a one-woman piece, and the one woman is Bridget Sullivan, who was a live-in cook and maid in the home of Andrew Borden of Fall River, Massachusetts. Yes, the Andrew Borden who was the recipient of eleven of the famous "forty whacks" presumably delivered by his daughter Lizzie's axe. The premise of my play is that Bridget was the actual wielder of the much-celebrated and conspicuous-in-its-absence ax (or hatchet).  Everything in the trial transcripts  supports that theory, as well as what is known about the habits, attitudes, history, character, and personality of LIzzie Borden.
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Obviously the crime was frenzied and spontaneous--an act of passion. (The Bordens were each dead on the first blow.) Murders that are motivated by desires to inherit generally involve either long-range planning (cumulative doses of untraceable poision) or felicitous  opportunities (finding oneself alone with the victim on the edge of a cliff at night). Crimes involving overkill generally are triggered by immediate and overwhelming circumstances... like abuses of power and/or outright sadism.

Bridget had just been vomiting in the yard on the hottest day of the summer when her mistress, Andrew's wife, gave her the order to wash every window in the house, upstairs and downstairs, inside and out. In 1892, this entailed ladders, buckets, trips to an outdoor pump,brushes, and rags. Not surprisingly, Bridget had only washed a window or two before the arrival of the police and the discovery of Mrs. Borden's mutilated corpse.

One of the first actions by the police was a lock-down of the house. No one was allowed to leave. Oh, except the "Irish girl." She was allowed to leave the house to stay with a friend, taking with her an uninspected bundle of possessions. After all, she was just the maid.
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What caught my attention was the fact that Mrs. Borden had been stricken with a bout of vomiting just the day before, and had taken to her bed. In other words, she had good reason to empathize with Bridget's distress and physical debilitation. Why would she insist on a chore that certainly could wait a day-- or even a week?  There can be only two answers: sadism or staggering classism. She either delighted in tormenting Bridget or else she considered the "Irish girl" to be of a different species than herself-- a species impervious to heat and illness, and whose responses were either lazy malingering or ungrateful attempts to cheat her employer out of a day's labor!
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Reading Mrs. Woolf and the Servants opened my eyes to the fact that Abigail Borden's attitude toward Bridget was far from unusual. In fact, it reflected prevailing attitudes among the privileged classes of England. Servants were expected to work for little more than room and board. They bought their own uniforms, worked from sunup to sundown, and only had two days off a month. Frequently, the kitchens and washrooms where they worked were in basements, and their rooms were cramped and inadequately heated and ventilated. (Bridget's room was under the eaves and must have been stifling the night before the murders.) Often the servants were assigned names at the whim of their employers who were too lazy to learn their real names. (Bridget had been called "Maggie.") Without pensions or insurance, they relied on the patronage of their employers for support in old age and in sickness. Employers, then as now, had strong incentives to "let go" older workers, in order to avoid the fiscal responsibility for their retirement.

In spite of this appallingly exploitive situation, employers expected loyalty and gratitude from their servants. They saw themselves as role models and mentors for their servants, introducing them to a life of refinement and morals that working-class folks presumably could not be expected to find among their peers. Employers felt entitled to enter a servant's room at any time, and to search their possessions without permission. All of this was for the good of the servant, of course.
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This world changed, however, and Virginia Woolf lived through the transitional time. When she and her sister Vanessa moved from the family estate to Bloomsbury, they left behind many of the rigid class roles and formal rituals of their Victorian girlhoods. What they did not leave behind, however, were the servants. But in Bloomsbury, there was no need for the liveried fleet of gardeners, coachmen, personal valets, parlor maids, cooks, charwomen, etc. There would only be a maid and a cook. The uniforms and the hated white caps were gone. The servants could say "Miss Stephens" instead of "Madam." Occasionally, they were even invited to eat with their employers. The middle-class youth of Bloomsbury considered themselves artists, bohemians, radicals, socialists.

This must have been enormously confusing for the servants. With the old upstairs/downstairs boundaries gone, where were the new ones? No one seemed to know. The Woolfs would host political meetings in their home which the servants would attend as fellow socialists... at least until it was time to cook dinner. In spite of her repeated attempts to include working-class characters in her books, Virginia would usually end by editing them out of the final revision, acknowledging her near-total ignorance about their lives.
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Two things stand out to me from reading about Woolf and her servants:

1) The time when Virginia's cook ordered her out of her room and Virginia pitched a fit.

2) The fact that two of her servants appeared to have been in a relationship of primary intimacy during the eight years when they lived under Virginia's roof and shared a bed in their room together.

The first stands out because Virginia Woolf is famous for her 1929 treatise,  A Room of One's Own, where she argued passionately how women's creativity had been and was continuing to be stunted by their lack of access to a room that was their own. So here we have Nellie Boxall, thirty-seven years old, who has been living with and working for Virginia for eleven years... for five pounds a year, working 341 days per year... and Virginia, who is fighting with her, enters Nellie's room. What does Nellie do? She orders her out. And what is Virginia's reaction? Does she applaud her for defending her territory? Here is Light's description:

"Nellie had got above herself; in reality the room was not 'hers.' Being treated like a servant was so painful and humiliating that Virginia went straight to Leonard and determined to sack Nellie by Christmas. The 'famous scene' was relived in her imagination many times. She found herself muttering  and rehearsing arguments, unable to work, sick and shivery, trembling with anticipation at the day... when she would give Nellie a month's notice. She wrote in her diary as if possessed, copying out replies to Nellie, speaking their parts..." (p. 193.)

Wow. Just wow.
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And then there is the fact that Nellie Boxall and Lottie Hope came together to work for the Woolfs in 1916. Nellie was twenty-six and Lottie was a year younger.  These two young women lived, worked, and slept together in a shared bed at Hogarth House for eight years. Before that, they had lived and worked together in Roger Fry's home for five years. Virginia fired Lottie in 1924, but Nellie stayed on for another ten years. In 1941, both of the women moved into a rented home of their own, which Nellie eventually bought,  and where they lived together for another twenty-four years, until Nellie's death. The two were inseparable, being seen together at weddings, funerals, holidays, visiting.

Nellie was the stouter, the butch. Lottie, rumored to have gypsy blood, was the more glamorous. Lottie had been a foundling, raised in the Home for Deserted Children, and Nellie, the youngest of ten, had been orphaned at twelve. Nellie's relationship with Lottie was protective and maternal. They shared a bedroom from the time they were twenty-one until they were thirty- four, and then again from fifty-one until seventy-five. It was an enduring love.

Did Virginia Woolf notice? How could she not? More to the point, what did Nellie and Lottie make of their employer who was not even ten years older then them? Virginia Woolf was a study in chronic discontent, in parsimony, in eating disorders... And then there was her sexless marriage with Leonard--something that would have been difficult to hide from the servants. And friendships? Virginia took malicious delight in writing scathing inventories of her closest women friends in her diaries, and she often peopled her novels with hateful caricatures of them. In the end, she took her own life.

In spite of their oppression, it was  Nellie and Lottie who managed to find a room of their own and to fill it with loyalty and loving companionship. Too bad Virginia never took a page from their book.