Up Front.

This week, Claire Messud reviews Alison Light's ''Mrs. Woolf and the Servants,'' a study of Virginia Woolf's often fraught relationship with the cooks and cleaners who helped make her (and her husband's) literary work possible. Woolf said that a woman needs a room of her own in order to write fiction; does she also need someone to clean it? ''Let's put it another, even less correct, way,'' Messud, whose most recent novel is ''The Emperor's Children,'' wrote in an e-mail message. ''Everyone needs a wife. For heaven's sake, a stay-at-home mum needs a wife.'' Messud, who lives in Cambridge, Mass., with her husband, the critic James Wood, and their two children, hints at a certain level of productive chaos in her own literary household: ''The hovering domestic chores are, experience suggests, a greater burden for women than for men (it seems, somehow, that the men can more often forget about toilet paper and light bulbs); but I think it was Rebecca West who said that a house uncleaned is better than a life unlived. You've got to make choices at some point. About housecleaning and about answering e-mails or the phone, and ultimately about bigger things, too.'' Messud's review appears in this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]