Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times

Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice "Beautifully written, sparkling with insight, and a pleasure to read, Servants is social history at its most humane and perceptive." —Paul Addison, Times Literary Supplement From the immense staff running a lavish Edwardian estate to the lonely maid-of-all-work cooking in a cramped middle-class house, domestics were an essential yet unobtrusive part of the British hierarchy for much of the past century, required to tread softly and blend into the background. Lucy Lethbridge’s Servants gives them a voice in this discerning portrait of the complex relationship between the server, the served, and the world they lived in, opening a window on British society from the Edwardian period to the present.