virginia's vivid nightmares

Moths that fly by day are not properly to be called moths; they do not excite that pleasant sense of dark autumn nights and ivy–blossom which the commonest yellow–underwing asleep in the shadow of the curtain never fails to rouse in us. They are hybrid creatures, neither gay like butterflies nor…

the New York Times, a book review

By CLAIRE MESSUD
Published: October 17, 2008

“In July 1934, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, “After 18 years I at last got rid of an affectionate domestic tyrant.” She was referring to her cook, Nellie Boxall — whose name she persistently spelled “Nelly” — whom she had finally fired after years of emotional tussling between mistress and servant.”

“The result is an absorbing and complex portrait of Woolf’s particular relation to domestics and domesticity (in her later years, amazingly, she learned to cook),but also an analysis of the shifting mores of the period and, most particularly, of the often forgotten individuals whose faithful service to the Woolfs and to servant-swapping Bloomsbury enabled the creation of much high-modernist art.”

“Clearly the relationship between Nellie and her employer was one of mutual disgruntlement and repeated scenes, as consuming as any dysfunctional intimate friendship. But after the single sentence in her diary in which Virginia records Nellie’s departure, the cook vanishes from her records forever: “After 1934 Nellie Boxall was expunged, as if she had indeed been murdered on that last day. No more references, no more fleeting glimpses of her as there are of Lottie Hope or Sophie Farrell, only a blank, after 18 years of intimacy. No letters or reminders were kept.” This is all the more surprising because, Light makes clear, their paths continued to cross. “

“Sophie Farrell came to work as a cook for Virginia’s parents, Julia and Leslie Stephen, in 1886, when Virginia was only 4 years old. Sophie stayed on with the family after Julia Stephen’s early death from rheumatic fever in 1895, and would remain a presence in Virginia’s life right up to its end(…)”

Picture of Sophie Farell (1890)

by awritersruminations

(NOTE: This essay was written on very short notice. Someone else was scheduled to write about Woolf but, as we all know, things happen and it just wasn’t possible but I do hope that this person one day writes about Woolf and, when she does, I want to read it because she…