Mrs Woolf and the Servants by Alison Light

Author:Alison Light
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2007-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Lottie and Nellie

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The year in which Virginia Woolf began to draft The Waves, her most experimental and inward work – 1929 – was also the year when a revolution took place in Monk’s House kitchen: Mrs Woolf began to cook dinner. The Woolfs replaced the old solid fuel kitchen-range, which ate up wood or coal and needed plenty of manual labour to stoke it and nurture it, with a modern oil stove. Anyone could cook sausages or stews in glass dishes ‘without smell, waste or confusion’, those bugbears of the bourgeois home:

one turns the handles; there is a thermometer. And so I see myself freer, more independent – & all one’s life is a struggle for freedom – able to come down here with a chop in a bag & live on my own. I go over the dishes I shall cook – the rich stews, the sauces. The adventurous strange dishes with dashes of wine in them.

She wrote gaily to Vita that it made her ‘free forever of cooks. I cooked veal cutlets and cake today. I assure you it is better than writing these idiotic books.’ Without children, without a large household to run, with increasing income, new gadgets and regular help, Mrs Woolf, like other middle-class women, could afford to enjoy domesticity. Unlike many of them, her ultimate fantasy of freedom was to live on her own; to be able at last, in her late forties, to fend for herself.

Independence was the keynote of that summer. In June, the month of the oil stove, she finished revising A Room of One’s Own, and noted that ‘this last half year I made over £1800; almost at the rate of £4000 a year; the salary almost of a Cabinet minister; & time was, two years ago, when I toiled to make £200’. The Woolfs had long planned an extension to Monk’s House and now, thanks to Orlando, Mr Philcox was adding on a bedroom and writing room for Virginia, overlooking the garden and downs. The attic became Leonard’s study. Virginia still wrote in the garden ‘lodge’ in warm weather but she was at last to have the room of her own which her earnings had afforded her. Brought up without extravagance she could now enjoy buying things, including ‘desks, tables, sideboards, crockery for Rodmell’, corner cupboards, beds from Heal’s; she commissioned Vanessa and friends to design fireplace tiles, armchair covers or table tops and curtains, drawing on her ‘hoard’, the excess of income which was left to her after Leonard had worked out the year’s joint expenses. She warned herself, however, about becoming too attached to property, disliking the display of possessions in a friend’s plush home: ‘Can one really be in love with a house? Is there not something sterile, so that one’s mind becomes stringy in these passions?’ Her goal was freedom, though that too could become ‘a fetish’, but it remained the justification for comfort or trying out new gadgets, or even experimenting with her appearance.

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