Having grown up taking servants for granted, Virginia Woolf lived through a period when the status of women and relations between the classes underwent significant change. Her attitudes towards her staff exposed her most ugly qualities. Writing about an airraid, she says: "What an irony if they should escape and we be killed." But Woolf also experienced "guilt, pity and rage" about her "general ineptitude" as an employer, and in her fiction, surprisingly reserved some of the tenderest passages for domestic staff. Alison Light's involving, gossipy slice of social history makes clever use of Woolf's diaries and letters to remind us that even forward-thinking intellectuals needed their chamber pots emptying. .
