“Mabel sweats when she is making jam.” This terse and disapproving diary entry, describing the work being done by a domestic servant, was made by the English writer Virginia Woolf. It feels dated for several reasons. Nobody gets called Mabel anymore, hardly anyone makes their own jam, and it will simply no longer do to express such snobbish views about the staff.

In her new book Mrs Woolf and the servants: the hidden heart of domestic service, Alison Light, a senior lecturer at the University of Newcastle, reveals some of the prosaic realities that lay behind the Bloomsbury myth.