"As a progressive woman of independent means, she tried her best to reconcile her desire to live freely and spontaneously with an atavistic urge to surrender all responsibility for herself. She had grown up in a large family that was attended to by a staff of seven; therefore, you could say, she knew no different.
"Upon reaching adulthood, she would never live without some form of domestic 'help', and battling the 'timid spiteful servant mind' throughout her life both enraged her and sustained her. It was easier for her to regard her servants as not quite real than to accept the fact of her dependence on others.
"Woolf's diary became a repository for all her meanest thoughts about her servants."
In the Telegraph, Lynsey Hanley reviews Alison Light's Mrs Woolf and the Servants: The Hidden Heart of Domestic Service.
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