Here are 100 books that Life as We Have Known It fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’m a professor of modern Britain with a specialty in nineteenth-century social history. I’m drawn to sources and topics that tell us about how everyday people lived and thought about their lives. One favorite part of my job is the challenge of discovering more about those groups, like working-class women or children, who weren’t the main focus of earlier histories. Since 2000, I’ve taught classes at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, on Victorian Britain, the British Empire, the First World War, and the history of childhood.
This is one of the first books that I remember buying for myself in graduate school. Cullwick’s descriptions of her relationship with upper-class Arthur Munby (whom she eventually married) and the photographs of her dressed as a maid-of-all-work, a lady, a “slave,” an agricultural worker, and a valet highlight Victorian power negotiations and performativity.
Cullwick started working as a servant at the age of eight. From her diaries, I learned much about the daily lives of domestic servants: their relationships with employers, the different levels of service and employment networks, and the sheer amount of hard, physical labor that it took to run a Victorian household.
"Hannah Cullwick (1833-1909) worked all her life as a maidservant, scullion, and pot-girl. In 1854 she met Arthur Munby, 'man of two worlds,' upper-class author and poet, with a lifelong obsession for lower-class women. And so began their strange and secret romance of eighteen years and marriage of thiry-six, lived largely apart. Hannah's diaries, written on Munby's suggestion, offer an obsorbing account of life 'below stairs' in Victorian England. But they reveal, too, a woman of extraordinary independence of will, whose chosen life of drudgery gave her the freedom not to 'play the Lady,' as Munby demanded. Rescued from obscurity.…
I became fascinated by the Victorian period when I started tracing my family tree in my teens. I wanted to find out more about my ancestors’ lives, and social history quickly became my passion. At weekends, I would visit stately homes and country houses, and I was always more interested in the kitchens and servants’ quarters below the stairs than the grand rooms upstairs. Oral history is one of the most under-valued sources, but it really brings history to life. This list features some of the most detailed memoirs and diaries by domestic servants who wrote about their working lives. Hope you enjoy them!
In spite of its title, Eric Horne’sWhat the Butler Winked At does not contain any really juicy tales about his employers. But what it does do is lift the lid on Horne’s working experiences as a footman, valet and butler during a career spanning 50 years, starting in the 1870s.
Interestingly, Horne wrote his book in 1923 at a time when the great country estates were beginning to break up and he was struggling to find work. Horne was not a professional writer so there are grammar issues; also, some of the anecdotes may not be amusing to modern readers. But the book is packed with fascinating details about what life was like working in domestic service, not just for male servants, but female servants too.
Eric Horne served as a butler in some of the great English country manors from the 1860s until just after World War I, when many of the families whose heirs died in battle were forced to sell off their homes. Born in Southampton, Horne came from a humble family who valued education. Horne excelled in school and wished to go to sea, but lacking his parents' permission, he instead ended up as a footboy for a local household. Over the years, Horne moved up in the service of the aristocracy: his goal was to become butler to the king of…
I became fascinated by the Victorian period when I started tracing my family tree in my teens. I wanted to find out more about my ancestors’ lives, and social history quickly became my passion. At weekends, I would visit stately homes and country houses, and I was always more interested in the kitchens and servants’ quarters below the stairs than the grand rooms upstairs. Oral history is one of the most under-valued sources, but it really brings history to life. This list features some of the most detailed memoirs and diaries by domestic servants who wrote about their working lives. Hope you enjoy them!
Elizabeth Banks was an American journalist who settled in London around 1893. She undertook a series of ‘adventures’ in which she posed as a laundry girl, a crossing sweeper, a flower girl, a chaperone, an heiress, and a domestic servant. In working as a maid, she hoped to discover why domestic service ‘was looked upon with so much contumely’.
Originally published as "In Cap and Apron" in the Weekly Sun, Elizabeth’s experiences were then published in 1894 in Campaigns of Curiosity: Journalistic Adventures of an American Girl in London. It’s not clear how much artistic licence Elizabeth used when describing her time in domestic service, but she does provide some interesting details about the duties of staff in households where three or four servants were employed.
Campaigns of Curiosity; Journalistic Adventures of an American Girl in London is the autobiography of a girl from New Jersey living in London during the height of the Victorian Era.
I became fascinated by the Victorian period when I started tracing my family tree in my teens. I wanted to find out more about my ancestors’ lives, and social history quickly became my passion. At weekends, I would visit stately homes and country houses, and I was always more interested in the kitchens and servants’ quarters below the stairs than the grand rooms upstairs. Oral history is one of the most under-valued sources, but it really brings history to life. This list features some of the most detailed memoirs and diaries by domestic servants who wrote about their working lives. Hope you enjoy them!
William Tayler worked as a footman in London for the wealthy widow Mrs. Prinsep and her unmarried daughter. He kept a diary for the year 1837 "as I am a wretched bad writer [and] many of my friends have advised me to practice more…" On Sundays, he usually went to see his wife and children who were lodged nearby, although he never mentions her or them by name.
As it focuses on just one year, the diary only provides a snapshot of William’s working life. However, it gives an illuminating insight into the life of a male servant for the gentry, including details of what William did in his spare time and how the wealthy entertained. Research has shown that he later became a butler.
Before you read William’s Journal, it is necessary to sketch in his background as briefly as possible. He came from the hamlet of Grafton, which is situated in the south-west corner of Oxfordshire, not far from Faringdon in Berkshire. Its seven grey Cotswold stone farmhouses are linked together by a brook and in the old days you could walk from one house to another along the brookside. These farmhouses sit like old ladies facing the sun and are all on the north side of the brook. In front of them lies all that is left of Grafton Common. If you…
I’ve always loved history, whether ancient or “modern.” Past societies and how humanity has changed over the years has always fascinated me. As a young mystery reader, I began with Nancy Drew and then quickly graduated to Victoria Holt. I’m not sure there’s a gothic fiction reader out there who won’t be familiar with that name. The stories are a wonderful blend of mystery, history, and a dash of the supernatural. Decades later, I’d write my fourth series, Duchess of Blackmoore Mysteries, in true gothic Victorian style.
Another fabulous London-set book where magic is real! The character of Eliza is a fantastic one to follow through this first book and the series. The web of intrigue will draw you into this alternate-history saga and keep you turning pages way past your bedtime! By now, you probably can tell how much I love magic mixed with the real world, and this book does a fantastic job of blending the two. With a fantastic set of characters, fabulous historical setting, and the mystery of magic, it sets up for a great story and a great series.
London is a powder keg… and Eliza Braxton is the match.
Imagine a London where magic is real… real, but feared. This is Eliza Braxton’s London, and she has always accepted her place in it gladly. As one of the Riftborn, her magic has relegated her to the servant class, where she dutifully serves as the lady’s maid in one of the most powerful households in the country. There, she uses her remarkable powers of persuasion to keep Elder Hallewell’s rebellious daughter in the path to an arranged match of power and prosperity. Eliza has never questioned her loyalty… until…
I write romantic historical fiction and am a lifelong lover of the works of Jane Austen. I am English, love historical novels but dislike books that give you “great lumps of facts” that slow up the storyline. I like stories and characters that capture your attention and your heart. Plots and backgrounds that make you think about what it might really have been like to live in those times.
This wonderful novel looks at the whole affair from the servants’ points of view. “If Elizabeth Bennet had the washing of her own petticoats, Sarah often thought, she’d most likely be a sight more careful with them.” I love this book.
Love the way the historical domestic details are covered so effortlessly and the emotions explored of those silent characters who watch their “betters”, take messages, serve meals, and endlessly wash clothes!
THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER A RICHARD AND JUDY BOOKCLUB PICK 'Utterly engrossing' Guardian
It is wash-day for the housemaids at Longbourn House, and Sarah's hands are chapped and raw. Domestic life below stairs, ruled with a tender heart and an iron will by Mrs Hill the housekeeper, is about to be disturbed by the arrival of a new footman, bearing secrets and the scent of the sea.
What readers are saying:
'A novel to be savoured' 'Highly recommended' 'Very enjoyable exploration of the background to Pride and Prejudice'
Stories of the past are always about making claims to the present and future. These claims include which stories—whose stories—are persistently silenced, ignored, or made very hard to hear, see, and know in the dominant culture. I am a cultural historian of U.S. political history, broadly imagined. My work is almost always driven by the same question: Why didn’t I already know this? Quickly followed by: What has it meant that I didn’t know this? Invariably, the answers are found in the histories of women, gender, race, sexuality, class, and immigration.
Childress’s novel is a compilation of short pieces originally published serially in two different Black-owned newspapers. In each story, Mildred, a Black domestic worker in New York City, recounts to her friend, Marge, the humorous, infuriating, and all too familiar experiences of working for various white families across the city. She also describes her refusal to remain silent in the face of white employers’ micro-aggressions, outright venom, and fantasies that she’s their loving mammy. Childress’s stories were a powerful salve to the Black household workers and others who first read them in a newspaper. Most of them daily confronted similar situations and worse, but lacked the safety or resources to resist in the same direct ways.
The hilarious, uncompromising novel about African American domestic workers—from a trailblazer in Black women’s literature and now featuring a foreword by Roxane Gay
First published in Paul Robeson’s newspaper, Freedom, and composed of a series of conversations between Mildred, a black domestic, and her friend Marge, Like One of the Family is a wry, incisive portrait of working women in Harlem in the 1950s. Rippling with satire and humor, Mildred’s outspoken accounts vividly capture her white employers’ complacency and condescension—and their startled reactions to a maid who speaks her mind and refuses to exchange dignity for…
I am Peter C. Bradbury, and it was reading the books of P.G. Wodehouse that attracted me to the career of being a butler. I have also always loved murder mysteries, so when I started writing, I combined those aspects into my first book. I chose these particular books because of the details and the subjects. I was a butler for over twenty years in the UK and the USA, and it annoys me when household staff are incorrectly portrayed. I love movies like Gosford Park and series like Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey. The butler sees and hears everything, so I like the writers who know that.
I loved this book and the movie. The attention to detail was wonderful, and the butler’s relationship with the housekeeper was spot-on for the period. I could really relate to the butler, being one myself, and to his loyalty to his employer. The only quibble I had was that the butler didn’t say anything when he was asked for his opinion. I understood why he didn’t, but you are rarely asked, so you have to speak up when given the opportunity. It's just a great book!
*Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel Klara and the Sun is now available to preorder*
The Remains of the Day won the 1989 Booker Prize and cemented Kazuo Ishiguro's place as one of the world's greatest writers. David Lodge, chairman of the judges in 1989, said, it's "a cunningly structured and beautifully paced performance". This is a haunting evocation of lost causes and lost love, and an elegy for England at a time of acute change. Ishiguro's work has been translated into more than forty languages and has sold millions of copies worldwide.
Stevens, the long-serving butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on…
Women’s rights in the workplace have been my passion for thirty years. As a sociologist who does fieldwork and oral histories, I am interested in understanding work through workers’ perspectives. The most important thing I’ve learned is that employers can be notoriously reluctant to enact change and that the most effective route to workplace justice is through collective action. I keep writing because I want more of us to imagine workplaces that value workers by compensating everyone fairly and giving workers greater control over their office’s rhythm and structure.
Did you know that until 1974, the job category ‘domestic worker’ was excluded from labor rights that were established in FDR’s New Deal legislation such as the minimum wage and workers’ compensation? Did you know that 1960s union leaders ignored the exploitative labor conditions of domestic work because they considered these workers “unorganizable”?
Historian Premilla Nadasan’s wonderful book tells the story of Black domestic workers’ exclusion from legal rights to which other workers were entitled and their fight to gain those rights beginning in the 1950s and extending through the establishment of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1974.
Telling this history through the life stories of domestic workers who were leaders in this movement makes this book a particularly compelling and worthwhile read.
Telling the stories of African American domestic workers, this book resurrects a little-known history of domestic worker activism in the 1960s and 1970s, offering new perspectives on race, labor, feminism, and organizing.
In this groundbreaking history of African American domestic-worker organizing, scholar and activist Premilla Nadasen shatters countless myths and misconceptions about an historically misunderstood workforce. Resurrecting a little-known history of domestic-worker activism from the 1950s to the 1970s, Nadasen shows how these women were a far cry from the stereotyped passive and powerless victims; they were innovative labor organizers who tirelessly organized on buses and streets across the United…
Growing up in a blue-collar union family in the 1950s South I learned about the depth of racial and class injustice and the power of collective organizing. The many jobs I held in my twenties before fleeing to graduate school at Stanford University left me acutely aware of workplace sexism and disrespect. I became fascinated by how work shapes our sense of self and especially curious about the distinctive feminisms, labor movements, and politics of working-class women. These questions animate all my writing and teaching. Thirty years and seven books later, I believe reimagining work and labor movements is more necessary – and possible – than ever before.
Domestic workers, among the most exploited of the world’s working classes, knew they deserved more and believed the work they did – caring for the children, the disabled, the elderly – should be honored.
They organized first in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Soon the movement spread across the world. Jennifer Fish travels with the movement, from Cape Town to Geneva, Montevideo, and beyond. Like the women she befriends, Fish believes in the power of community and of what can be achieved when workers imagine the world they want and start moving together toward it.
There’s no better book about international worker solidarity and the power of thinking and acting both local and global.
From grassroots to global activism, the untold story of the world's first domestic workers' movement.
Domestic workers exist on the margins of the world labor market. Maids, nannies, housekeepers, au pairs, and other care workers are most often 'off the books,' working for long hours and low pay. They are not afforded legal protections or benefits such as union membership, health care, vacation days, and retirement plans. Many women who perform these jobs are migrants, and are oftentimes dependent upon their employers for room and board as well as their immigration status, creating an extremely vulnerable category of workers in…
