Mrs Woolf and the Servants, by Alison Light

In 1911, 29-year-old Virginia Woolf (then Virginia Stephen) rented a house in London's Brunswick Square with three young men. In what was intended as an experiment in communal living, the housemates struck a blow against formal meals with a system of trays which they could order for their rooms by ticking a list in the hall. The trays (bearing cooked breakfasts, two-course lunches, mid-afternoon tea, and three-course dinners) were provided by Sophie Farrell and Maud Chart, the cook and housemaid who lived in the basement.

Somebody had to do it: as Alison Light notes, in early 20th-century Britain, "most women expected either to be servants or to keep servants", and Virginia, like the men in the house (who included her husband-to-be Leonard Woolf, and economist John Maynard Keynes) had her writing to get on with. "Servants are everywhere and nowhere in history," writes Light, a professor at the University of East London, whose grandmother Lilian Heffren was a kitchen-maid.

"Servants may leave only vestigial traces in the official histories of the past, but they have always loomed large in the imagination of their employers... the 'uppish' servant reappears in different guises through the ages." Triumphantly uppish, the kitchen-maid's granddaughter-turned-professor knows what questions to ask as she ventures below the stairs of Bloomsbury to examine its domestic underpinnings.

The names of the houses lived in by the Woolfs and their associates, so evocative of upper-class bohemianism and the life of the mind, take on new significance when we try to imagine – as Light insists – the work of keeping them cleaned, heated, mucked out and provisioned. Monk's House, Rodmell had a dark, damp kitchen, with rats and no running water. Asheham House near Firle, a chilly house with stone floors, was miles from the nearest shop. Hogarth House in Richmond at least boasted modern plumbing – but also had a printing press in the larder. This venture into self-publishing allowed Virginia to boast she was "the only woman in London who can write what she likes", but for the servants it meant employers' clutter in their work area.

"My purpose is not to debunk or devalue Virginia Woolf or her writing," writes Light, who acknowledges that domestic service in the Woolf household was probably easier, better-paid, less formal and more fun than in many comparable situations. A suffragist and supporter of the Labour Party and Women's Co-operative Guild, Woolf was sympathetic to the plight of working-class women. But she didn't like them much. In her diaries she rails against "the timid, spiteful servant mind". Between her and Leonard, "housemaid" was a term of abuse.

Invited in 1930 to contribute an introduction to the Guild's book of reminiscences Life As We Have Known It, Woolf confided to her sister Vanessa that writing about working women "was as if you had to sew canopies around chamber-pots". The first draft had to be rewritten because her queasy remarks about the muscular bodies and "enormous arms" of working women offended some of the book's authors.

"The figure of the servant and the working woman haunts Woolf's experiments in literary modernism," says Light, "and sets limits to what she can achieve." Housemaids' chat in Between The Acts is " banal and mindless"; The Years "avoids representing contemporary servants". Woolf considered writing stories about her cook Nellie Boxall and her housekeeper Mabel Haskins, but never managed either. And in the short story "The Watering Place", the lavatory attendant who features in early drafts is edited out of the final version. Despite her fascination for "one of those women who are forever opening doors" , Woolf could not bear to write about her.

It does not necessarily follow that Woolf would have been a better writer if she had done her own housework, or had a better attitude to those who did it for her. The creative process is more complicated; otherwise one might equally argue that since Woolf's most productive period coincided with the years when Boxall was her cook-housekeeper, servants are essential. No writer can seriously be evaluated in terms of what they might have produced in different circumstances.

Through more than a decade of research, Light has uncovered material that is fascinating and important, both in itself and for what it tells us about Bloomsbury and domestic service. Her writing is leavened with wit and anger. She savages rich people who talk about being hard-up when they mean they might have to sell shares, and toffs who discuss the servant problem without ever wondering whether they might be a problem to the servants.

As a scholar Light can almost be heard sighing with exasperation as she tells us that yet another document has gone missing, thanks to someone's partiality, elitism or carelessness. Letters to Virginia Woolf from her housemaid Lottie Hope, described by their recipient as "from friend to friend", have not survived; neither has a paper by cook-housekeeper Louie Everest on education, given in the early 1930s at a meeting of Rodmell Labour Party, half of whose membership were Woolf employees. Mrs Brereton, governess to Virginia Woolf's nephews, wrote a half-completed novel about her experience, which their mother (Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf's sister) found to be full of "extraordinary bitterness." That hasn't survived either.

Despite some blurred outlines, the servants upstage the better-known Bloomsbury names. It's a satisfying approach, although, because of gaps in the material, it makes for a narrative that is schematic and disorganised in places. But this is an absorbing investigation, serious, radical and feminist in its politics, entertaining in its delivery.

Illustrations include photographs of the Woolf servants, Vanessa Bell's 1939 oil painting Interior With Housemaid, and a 1936 advertisement for a New World cooker which turns out to contain advice from Nellie Boxall on how to roast beef. Dismissed by the Woolfs in 1934 after 18 years of stormy service, she had moved on to work for actors Elsa Lanchester and Charles Laughton. Here she is, a celebrity cook – but only, as the advertisement deferentially reminds us, "by courtesy of Mr and Mrs Charles Laughton".

Zoë Fairbairns's 'How do you pronounce Nulliparous?' is published by Five Leaves

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