12 Facts About Nellie Boxall

Nellie Boxall's father worked in agriculture and in time for a railway company but he died in 1891.

Nellie Boxall's mother had ten children and Nellie was the youngest.

Nellie Boxall was educated at the local school and she went into domestic service which was the school's expectation.

Nellie Boxall obtained work near Guildford where she was employed by the painter and art critic Roger Fry at his house named Durbins.

Nellie Boxall started a lifelong friendship with Lottie Hope who was another servant.

Nellie Boxall did not want to take her servants for granted but she could not cook so had to just write about how her servant "sweats when she is making jam".

Nellie Boxall would stay with them for eighteen years until she was sacked during a final falling out.

Nellie Boxall was sent on cookery courses and she cooked for the visitors including Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

Nellie Boxall rarely spoke about these celebrities after she returned to Farncombe in 1939 to live with Lottie Hope.

Nellie Boxall worked in a hospital and when the BBC interviewed her she spoke kindly of Virginia Woolf.

Nellie Boxall would be included in the successor to her father's work, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Alicia Gimenez Bartlett imagined that Nellie Boxall had kept a diary and this was the basis of her work Una habitacion ajena which won a Lumen Prize in 1997.