ABSTRACT
Virginia Woolf never did write a “whole story” about her cook, Nellie Boxall, though her diary and letters are full of “her character-our efforts to be rid of her-our reconciliations.” In her incisive and revealing study of Woolf’s relationships with her servants, Alison Light demonstrates that Woolf tended to view the servants she employed in her adulthood as either objects of amusement or frustrating encumbrances-often as both. And yet concern with domesticity, inextricably linked for Woolf both personally and literarily with domestic servants, runs through Woolf’s essays, stories, and novels. As Victoria Rosner asserts, “no other major novelist of the period was so preoccupied with the critique of Victorian domesticity or so explicit about the relationship of literary modernism to the changing nature of private life” (15). If Woolf did not give Nellie her own story, the recurring presence in her work of the domestic laborer at the threshold, and the repeated subtle links between domestic service and artistic creation, offer an opportunity for reexamining and reevaluating the significance of all of those subjects.
