This is a sweet collection of manga short stories about maids during the Victorian era. Kaoru Mori’s art is so beautiful and fine that this is a delight to read. I love her eye for detail and emotion — I’m always a sucker for someone who can convey deep emotion in just a few lines, and she has that ability. I also appreciate her focus on historical details, as this era is in my zone of interest. This is fiction and has a gentle tone to it that makes it more fictional than historic (the life of a maid seems to be always portrayed as a positive one without backbreaking work), but there’s nothing that is super inaccurate.
Five of the stories are about Shirley, a 13 year old maid for Miss Bennett, who is a single woman who runs a cafe (which looks more like a pub, but they translate it as a cafe in the book). Miss Bennett puts an ad in the paper for a maid and Shirley shows up. She’s young but very serious, while Miss Bennett is more optimistic and high spirited. The little vignettes of their lives are shown with great delicacy, with events ranging from Shirley having a bad day to Miss Bennett being pressured to get married. The other two stories in the collection are standalone and deal with different maids. I liked both of them and think that they capture an idealized but meaningful relationship and how it can be bittersweet to be in service and close to someone while still having a remove. Reading this made me want to finally read her other work in this same genre, Emma, although that one is a love story and is several volumes long.
I would recommend this but it’s very out of print and the cheapest one on Ebay is about $45 now. There’s no other genre like manga to have such high prices for works that only went out of print a few years ago — they really must not print many copies! It’s so frustrating. Anyway, I’m going to keep this one and am glad I took the time to read it again.