{"id":1844,"date":"2021-05-17T15:35:26","date_gmt":"2021-05-17T13:35:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=1844"},"modified":"2021-05-17T15:35:26","modified_gmt":"2021-05-17T13:35:26","slug":"virginia-and-nellie-the-woman-with-no-room-of-her-own","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2021\/05\/17\/virginia-and-nellie-the-woman-with-no-room-of-her-own\/","title":{"rendered":"VIRGINIA AND NELLIE: THE WOMAN WITH NO ROOM OF HER OWN<\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

\tThis past Sant Jordi I was given as a present Alicia Gim\u00e9nez Bartlett\u2019s Una habitaci\u00f3n ajena<\/em> (A Room not of One\u2019s Own<\/em>), originally issued in 1997 and now re-issued in a new, revised edition published to coincide with the 80th anniversary of Virginia Woolf\u2019s death in 1941 (she was born in 1882). Bartlett\u2019s title alludes, of course, to Woolf\u2019s long essay \u201cA Room of One\u2019s Own\u201d (1929), in which the author argues that women have not been free to write as well as they could because they have lacked a room of one\u2019s own (but recall how Jane Austen wrote great novels half-hidden in a corner of her family\u2019s living room). The bit that is usually neglected in quotations is that the three times Woolf mentions this coveted room she also mentions money, specifically 500 pounds a year, which apparently come from work rather than rent (or maybe not). In short, calling her view with irony \u2018an opinion upon one minor point\u2019, Woolf writes that \u2018a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction\u2019. What Bartlett adds is that a woman writer must also have servants, whether she likes it or not. <\/p>\n

\tBartlett novelizes in her book the stormy relationship between Woolf and her two servants, Lottie Hope and Nellie Boxall, above all with Nellie. She takes up in this way the implicit challenge thrown by Woolf herself. In December 1929, Woolf candidly wrote in her diary that \u2018If I were reading this diary, if it were a book that came my way, I think I should seize with greed on the portrait of Nelly (sic), and make a story\u2013perhaps make the whole story revolve around that\u2013it would amuse me. Her character\u2013our efforts to get rid of her\u2013our reconciliations\u2019. The researcher that Bartlett invents for her novel tells us that Woolf made frequent mention in a rather acerbic tone of her clashes with Nellie (whose name she always misspelled), her cook and main housekeeper between 1916 and 1934. Bartlett imagines that Nellie learned to keep a diary from observing her mistress and, so, her novel intercalates the observations of the present-day researcher with this diary, and with dramatized chapters written in the third person. Bartlett swears in her author\u2019s note that all the petty misencounters depicted in her novel did happen, as attested by Woolf\u2019s own eight-volume diary. They were all based, according to Bartlett, on Nellie\u2019s progressive realization that her masters\u2019 left-wing political beliefs did not result in generosity towards their servants, whom, in short, they exploited (she was paid only \u00a320 a year). This is a thesis similar to what Alison Light maintains in her study Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury<\/em> (2007), though she cautions that the Marxist reading is in a way an anachronism, as few employers thought of servants as labour, seeing them instead as persons they kept.<\/p>\n

\tNellie started working at the Woolfs\u2019 in the middle of World War I, which is a major point of inflexion in the history of domestic service. Last year I read, as background to my teaching of Victorian Literature, Judith Flanders\u2019 The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed<\/em> (2004), Karen Foy\u2019s Life in the Victorian Kitchen<\/em> (2014), and Fiona McDonald\u2019s Victorian Servants, a Very Peculiar History<\/em> (2010). I learned from them that Victorian middle-class households were complex machineries with high maintenance needs requiring from one to twenty servants, depending on the owner\u2019s status. The Stephens, Virginia\u2019s parents (Leslie and Julia), had ten servants, which means that Woolf and her siblings grew up with all their personal needs catered for. The daily lives of Victorian servants were gruelling affairs, with constant hard-core chores from morning to evening, and no leisure except one afternoon off, a whole day if they were lucky. Pay was never high, and they always depended on the whims of masters and mistresses who could dismiss servants with no severance payment, and with no references though without these getting a new position was impossibly hard. Servants who grew sick or grew old always depended on the charity of their employers. And, of course, only upper servants in rich households (governesses, housekeepers, butlers) could expect to have a room of their own to sleep in; the rest shared cramped accommodation, usually in cold attics. Nellie, indeed, complains all the time about having to share a room with Lottie. When she finally has a room to herself, Virginia feels free to intrude whenever she pleases. A major row erupts, precisely, when an annoyed Nellie orders her mistress to leave her room. Such insolence!<\/p>\n

\tNo wonder, then, that as World War I progressed and the need for factory labour grew in the UK, more and more young women chose to abandon employment as servants. Besides, with prices rising throughout the 1920s and with the constant turmoil of the general strikes called by the unions, eventually the middle classes found themselves unable to employ domestic help beyond one or two persons, as was the Woolfs\u2019 case. A surprising aspect of Bartlett\u2019s novel is her description of the Woolfs\u2019 diverse homes\u2013Monk\u2019s House and Asham House in Sussex, and Hogarth House in London\u2019s Gordon Square\u2013as not particularly comfortable. It is hard for us to imagine middle-class persons living in homes with no hot water and no central heating, but that was common. Bartlett\u2019s Nellie complains all the time about being cold and about having to shift lots of coal constantly. The Woolfs never purchased the modern conveniences appearing in the early 20th century (vacuum cleaners, for instance, were commercialized in 1905). When, tired of their constant bickering and of her frequent threats to leave their service, Virginia curtly dismissed Nellie, she was happy to find a position with a couple who did have all the latest gadgets: actors Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester. She remained with them until 1939, choosing not to follow them to the USA. Instead, she retired to her native village, Farncombe in Surrey, and purchased there a home of her own, where she lived with fellow servant Lottie, until her death in 1965.<\/p>\n

\tI don\u2019t think that Woolf\u2019s relationship with Nellie is extraordinary. What is extraordinary is that it is documented in detail on the mistress\u2019 side and that this mistress happened to be a progressive feminist who believed in women\u2019s independence. For those of us coming from the working-classes the contradictions of middle-class feminism have always been easy to spot, like the glaring absence of domestic service from English fiction. TV series Upstairs, Downstairs<\/em> (1971-75) and Downtown Abbey<\/em> (2010-15, plus the two films, 2019 and 2021), together with Kazuo Ishiguro\u2019s marvellous novel The Remains of the Day<\/em> (1989), have appeased our curiosity about the lives of the servants in upper-class households. Yet, there is still much to say about the middle-class\u2019 uncomfortable relationship with its servants in the vein of what Bartlett does. Neither Virginia nor her sister Vanessa knew how to cook. Both, Alison Light writes, \u2018were irked by keeping servants but resigned to it\u2019. Their resignation has to do with the loss of privacy that became in the early 20th century an integral part of personal life. For the generation of their parents using domestic service was not an issue, but for Woolf\u2019s generation that bond became awkward, an unwanted intrusion in lives that felt exposed because they did not abide by standard social rules. Women like Virginia and Vanessa felt dependent and hated the burden of that feeling. In fact, Virginia would eventually learn to cook to be her own mistress and eat as she pleased. This crucial transition in the lives of middle-class women, from dependent to independent mistress of the house, has not been sufficiently narrated, though. There must be millions of Nellies (and of Virginias) waiting for their tale to be told.<\/p>\n

\tObviously, middle-class working women have never become independent because we still need domestic help. The servants are gone and, unlike what was promised, domestic appliances have not done away with housework, no matter how much they have simplified it. I just shudder at the thought of doing the washing by hand! We may have the room and the money, but not the domestic freedom that, as I see it, will only come with robotic servants. In the meantime, most of us manage with hourly-paid help (babysitters, cleaners) carried out by working women who manage their working-class homes quite often with the help of a grandmother. I\u2019m sure you must be thinking that if only the men helped more, our domestic troubles would be over. I believe, however, that this is not just a question of getting men more involved in domestic chores but of working fewer hours. 1970s feminism promised a utopia in which individuals would work part-time and there would be plenty of time to share housework, including raising children. As we are now, most middle-class couples in which both members work do need help, as Virginia and Leonard Woolf did a hundred years ago. We might not need live-in help, nor for the same exact chores, but we are still dependent on others. Unless, that is, we choose to keep our homes below the impossible spotless standards of full-time housewives (like my mother). I\u2019m not, then, writing this post to criticize the Woolfs\u2019 at all, but to stress that this middle-class dependence is still hidden in life and in fiction, as much as it was hidden in Austen\u2019s time or in Woolf\u2019s time. It may be swept away by the Roomba rather than under the rug, but it is still hidden.<\/p>\n

\tRead today, in 2021, Una habitaci\u00f3n ajena<\/em> may elicit a negative response about the privileged members of the Bloomsbury group and the social hypocrisy of the bohemian (English) middle-class, with its abstract left-wing politics and its inability to be truly interested in the persons they employed in their homes. I would be, however, careful about how we approach the portrait of the Woolfs. Looking at the book cover illustration, which shows Woolf sitting comfortably in an armchair as Nellie stands behind in her maid\u2019s uniform, I cannot help wondering whether Bartlett does all the housework in her home. I don\u2019t think J.K. Rowling does. Or less wealthy writers. The vision of a society in which every woman (and man) has a room to be creative in, sufficient money, and no need for domestic help is right now a utopia, for either we combine being creative with doing all our housework, or we employ someone else and enter the relations of dependence that Woolf bemoaned. I\u2019m sure many middle-class persons have excellent relations with their paid help which are mutually satisfactory, but I don\u2019t quite see how the working-class women employed by middle-class women in their homes can enjoy the same freedom of artistic and intellectual creation. Perhaps their daughters will, but then they will need somebody else\u2019s domestic help, too.<\/p>\n

\tThus, until the day when the Nellies of this world are housekeeping robots with no need for a room of their own.<\/p>\n

I publish a post once a week (follow @SaraMartinUAB). Comments are very welcome! Download the yearly volumes from http:\/\/ddd.uab.cat\/record\/116328. Visit my website http:\/\/gent.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This past Sant Jordi I was given as a present Alicia Gim\u00e9nez Bartlett\u2019s Una habitaci\u00f3n ajena (A Room not of One\u2019s Own), originally issued in 1997 and now re-issued in a new, revised edition published to coincide with the 80th anniversary of Virginia Woolf\u2019s death in 1941 (she was born in 1882). Bartlett\u2019s title alludes, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[165,199,212,296,331],"class_list":["post-1844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-studies","tag-domestic-service","tag-feminism","tag-gender-studies","tag-literary-studies","tag-middle-class-women"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1844"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1844\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}