Reading (and looking at: some terrific photos!) in this delightful NYT magazine piece about Olivia Laing’s country home in Suffolk, I find myself reminded of many things. Firstly, it prompted a childhood reminiscence of what a wonderful gardener my father was and how much I loved helping him, and how a long ago birthday gift of a simple plastic yellow watering-can is still before my inner eye, and how life then got complicated and time did its own thing with little regard for me, and it came to be that I’ve never had the opportunity to have a garden that I could call my own. And that makes me sad. And, and, and … Secondly, the Derek Jarman journal, Modern Nature, that Laing refers to has been asking to be read by me for a long time – in the UK at least it has a sort of legendary status. And, thirdly (but not really lastly), Laing’s own 2011 book – and her first – To the River, as a “rumination”, inspired by Virginia Woolf and which has her wandering the length of the River Ouse. What that rumination entails I could guess at – but need to know. Two more books.
But this is all a bit by the bye, what really diverted me – as so often happens – was an internal link to the NYT “By the Book” segment from earlier this year in which Olivia Laing was guest and her mention there of Alison Light’s 2007 book Mrs. Woolf and the Servants that she had read while writing her latest book Everybody (2021), saying: “[…it] is astonishing on the complex interrelations between bodies and class, bodies and gender…”. Light’s original work has come to my attention previously, and Virginia Woolf’s erratic behaviour towards her domestics is well known, and has often been a topic in academia and beyond. And something I have often contemplated.
But my interest at this moment has added intensity because, while reflecting on the mutual dependencies and alternating dynamics at play between Myriam and Louise in the Leïla Slimani novel just read, I was immediately struck by similarities with what I had discerned previously about Woolf’s fraught relationship with her servants, especially Nellie with whom she was in constant struggle; and perhaps encouraged in my thinking having shortly before read an “address as essay” by Slimani in which she quotes from a Woolf essay contrasting the status of the Victorian woman of a certain class – the so-called “Angel in the House” – with the (then) modern woman; the possibilities now open to her, but also the obstacles, sometimes invisible, that remain in her search for fulfillment, and especially when that reach is beyond the sacred bounds of home and garden, of family and servants.
I have downloaded Light’s book (Kindle link below), and have to say the prologue and the early pages – here, the “angel in the house” is Julia Stephen and the cook, Sophie Farrell, the “family treasure”- are a knockout. Already I can say, obviously a labor of love; written with verve and with respect for the subjects and their successes – large or small, celebrated or rarely noted – and an understanding for their failures and the prevailing circumstances – personal or societal or both.
I am, then, as I write, feeling madly indebted to Olivia Laing – and it is hardly to be wondered; to the question of what was the best book she has received as a gift comes the response:
[…] For my 40th birthday my mother gave me first editions of Woolf’s diaries. That was a magical present. I remember being entranced by the bindings as a child — the pale pink and duck egg blue spines with Bloomsbury crosshatching. Those would be my desert island books: the best possible mind to be accompanied by.
The New York Times “By the Book: Olivia Laing’s Reading Piles Are Far From Organized”
Mine are not nearly so fine, but Olivia Laing would surely with me agree: it’s all there to be found in the mind – and Virginia Woolf would add: words, words, words.