Mrs Woolf and The Servants, by Alison Light

“An invaluable glimpse into the hidden history of domestic service in an absorbing narrative, beautifully written” The Times

Unfortunately we were all disappointed with this book. It is not clear whether it was;
a) attempting to be an academic thesis about Virginia’s work,
b) a study of her domestic life,
c) a history of Virginia’s servants.
It lacked depth, was too long (a great deal of the material was not relevant) and the text meandered along jumping from one subject to another with no coherent structure - we wondered it if was edited at all. It certainly was not about Virginia’s servants.

It appeared that the book was put together from pieces of research left over from the author’s other work, as if the unused research material was too good to waste and resulted in this mishmash of unformulated ideas.

Despite this there was a great deal of good material and we felt that there was a nugget of a good book within the text (if not three). Some information was telling and informative but it was not well used. If Alison Light had concentrated on one subject in more detail ie the servants (women in service, nannies and childcare, au pairs etc, what’s changed?) she would have produced a much more coherent work.

All in all we felt there was some worthy material here but that the book had missed a trick and brought nothing new to the genre of Mrs Woolf or her servants.