Her main example of this change in human character was the “character of one’s cook.” Whereas the “Victorian cook lived like a leviathan in the lower depths,” modern cooks were forever coming out of the kitchen to borrow the Daily Herald and ask “advice about a hat.”
These examples seem to show novels after 1910 continuing the Victorian trend of limiting the fictional depiction of servants to their ability to serve, but they also show a calcified and static understanding of “servant” as a type, revealing an image that seems to have become a kind of proxy or a simulacrum that could overshadow the real.
fiction made room for more human depictions of those who were often previously overlooked.