At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

Beyond her spare account of duties, there was something even more extraordinary about Hannah Cullwick’s life, for she spent thirty-six years of it, from 1873 to her death in 1909, secretly married to her employer, a civil servant and minor poet named Arthur Munby, who never disclosed the relationship to family or friends. When alone, they lived as man and wife; when a visitor called, however, Cullwick stepped back into the role of maid. If overnight guests were present, Cullwick withdrew from the marital bed and slept in the kitchen. Munby was a man of some standing. He numbered among his friends Ruskin, Rossetti, and Browning, and they were frequent visitors to his home, but none had any idea that the woman who called him “Sir” was actually his wife. Even in private, their relationship was a touch unorthodox, to say the least. At his bidding, she called him “massa” and blacked her skin to make herself look like a slave. The diaries, it transpires, were kept largely so that he could read about her getting dirty.