'INTERIOR with Housemaid' (1939), by Vanessa Bell, shows a servant brushing the floor around a bureau on which paper and pens sit neatly, the chair pushed back, as if just vacated. The absent 'writer' is the focus of the painting, her character implied by detail. But the figure of the servant is more truly a presence in absence, her face rendered into a blur devoid of character and individuality: 'Housemaid Without Interior'.

In Mrs Woolf And The Servants, Alison Light asserts the universal right to have "interiority" acknowledged. She has a strong connection with her subject; her grandmother often spoke of the exploitation she endured going into service straight from a workhouse. Light never presumes to project thoughts and feelings onto individuals who have left little or no testimony. But she allows herself the latitude of speculation, often tying this to documentary sources. The servants whose lives are under scrutiny here figure in the journals of a great writer. Virginia Woolf may have revolutionised the novel form with stream of consciousness conveying inner experience but she had trouble imagining herself through the class divide. She often expressed her lack of empathy with the "lower" classes, almost questioning the humanity of those not born to the culture she understood.

WhileWoolf envisioned women freeing themselves of patriarchy and militarism, when it came to the domestic sphere rules and boundaries remained crucial, although superficially more relaxed than the norm. Her relationship with her cook Nellie Boxall, though punctuated with arguments and dismissals, lasted two decades. On one occasion, Boxall ordered the author of A Room Of One's Own to leave her room. That was the trigger for another "final" dismissal notice.

You couldn't make it up.

The intimate and public lives of the "Bloomsbury Set" have been intensively mined yet the perspective that might have been offered by their servants has been largely ignored. In 1956, Boxall and Lottie Hope were interviewed for BBC radio. The full tape includes much hilarity at the cooking and eating arrangements at Monks House. Leonard would take his bath behind a curtain in the kitchen, emerge for breakfast, then Virginia would disappear behind the curtain. "Yes, it was bread at one end and bath at the other, " Boxall laughs. Light suggests "both the laughter and the comments were edited down in the broadcast". The BBC saw to it that the proper proprieties of social hierarchy were restored.

Woolf was over 50 when she got an oil stove and announced herself "free forever of cooks". In a letter to Vita Sackville West, she noted that she had "cooked veal cutlets and cake today. I assure you that it is better than writing these idiotic books."