Apparently, it was Lytton Strachey who coined the term ‘filth packets’ when he was describing Virginia Woolf’s room of her own; for Virginia this meant envelopes containing bits of this and that – old nibs, bits of string, used matches, rusty paper clips, all the stuff that gathers on the desk of a writer, or did in the 1920s. According to Lytton, Virginia sat in the kind of armchair very familiar to me to write, which appeared to be suffering from ‘prolapsis uteri’.
Nevertheless, in spite of her filth packets, Virginia had staff – albeit not as many as there were in the house where she grew up in Kensington – but there was always someone to cook and clean the house and stop the grot spreading into other rooms.
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