Help! My wish list #3

Two more titles from my ever-expanding reading wish list.

** The cover images are for illustrative purposes only. If you are a publisher and would kindly like to offer me a copy of any of these books for review, I will change the cover(s) so as to reflect the edition received. **

Mrs Woolf and the Servants
By Alison Light

Amazon’s product description: Virginia Woolf was a feminist and a bohemian but without her servants – cooking, cleaning and keeping house - she might never have managed to write. Mrs Woolf and The Servants explores the hidden history of service. Through Virginia Woolf’s extensive diaries and letters and brilliant detective work, Alison Light chronicles the lives of those forgotten women who worked behind the scenes in Bloomsbury, and their fraught relations with one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers.


A Boy at the Hogarth Press

By Richard Kennedy

Amazon’s product description: After a rather unsuccessful education at Marlborough College, in 1926 sixteen-year-old Richard Kennedy was put firmly under the wing of Leonard Woolf as his new protegee at the Woolfs' printing press. Responsible for making tea, packing boxes and a host of other menial tasks, Kennedy observed unnoticed the social milieu of the sophisticated Bloomsbury set as it revolved around the Hogarth Press. Some forty years later, and by then a professional illustrator, he put pen to paper, recalling his time with Virginia and Leonard Woolf in candid and often hilarious detail. He tells of the success that Virginia enjoyed ('There is much talk of Mrs W's new book Orlando and plenty of tension'), of their chaotic office with its collapsing shelves, rats and arguments over toilet paper, and of his own often hapless attempts to keep pace with the literary giants around him. Illustrated throughout with Kennedy's own sketches, this is a delightful work that offers a unique peep into the Bloomsbury set.

Why I want to read these books: I just can’t get enough of Mrs Woolf!

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