Invisible hands …

… Ivebeenreadinglately: Servants.

Having one's affairs inspected by servants, Virginia [Woolf] wrote, was like "frying in greasy pans."

For anyone who wants to try to understand what it was like to be or to employ a servant, Light's book is indispensable. Her research is amazing, conjuring up the lives of people who, though they played crucial parts in the lives of the Woolfs, left few overt traces in the countless histories of the couple and their circle. In addition, she enables us to both see Woolf's blindness to the human actuality of her servants and to understand why she saw them, and understood her relationship with them, that way. The servants were not really to be thought about—fretted over, perhaps, with their snooping and stealing and moodiness—but not thought about. They were just there.