Virginia Woolf often observed what she called “the accumulation of unrecorded life”. In her 1929 feminist polemic, A Room of One's Own, she showed how the great Jacobean writer Judith Shakespeare - William's more talented sister - would have been oppressed and her works obscured by her gender. In this meticulously researched social and literary history, the historian Alison Light explores lives obscured by class and by occupation, as well as by gender - those of Woolf's domestic staff. Young Virginia Stephen grew up in a large Kensington house, surrounded by housemaids, cooks and nannies. Light uses the individual histories of these people to illuminate the lives of the thousands of women who were in service in the first half of the 20th century, using Woolf's diaries, essays and fiction to illuminate the relationship between servant and mistress. In an essay on The Servant Question, for example, Woolf argued that service was a condition shared between mistress and maid, both dependent on each other, yet the emotions expressed in her diaries are rather less egalitarian; when she wrote of “poor timid servant fears”, she conveyed both pity and contempt. Her journals also chart her turbulent relationship with her cook Nellie Boxall, who lived with the Woolfs for 18 years. The novelist who, in public, championed the rights of women to education and intellectual equality could note, in private, that Nellie's mind, devoid of logic, was a “loathesome spectacle”. This is not a rose-tinted view of Woolf, but it is a fascinating reminder that even for the avant-garde Bloomsbury group, to be modern did not always mean to be equal (Penguin £8.99)

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