Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House is a wonderful book. I love it not for it’s encyclopaedic information about every aspect of housekeeping, (a hefty 800 plus pages of up-to-date information about how to care for every kind of fabric, surface, and material in modern homes), but for the first 12 pages.

Cheryl Mendelson opens her book with a chapter titled ‘My Secret Life’. It begins: “I am a working woman with a secret life: I keep house.” She writes about her experience of housekeeping, how it has shaped her at different times in her life, and how housekeeping and the perception of housekeeping has changed.

It’s the best piece of writing about the meaning of housework I’ve read. She writes about how housekeeping is often overlooked and devalued, but “the sense of being at home is important to everyone’s well-being. If you do not get enough of it, your happiness, resilience, energy, humor, and courage will decrease… Being at home feels safe; you have a sense of relief whenever you come home and close the door behind you, reduced fear of social and emotional dangers as well as of physical ones. When you are home, you can let down your guard and take off your mask… Coming home is your major restorative in life.”

She argues the way to get these “formidably good things” is not by “finding true love or getting married or having children or landing the best job in the world – or even by moving into the house of your dreams…. What really does work to increase the feeling of having a home and its comforts is housekeeping.”

From the outside this book looks like a staid and conservative textbook, but I think of it more as a radical manifesto, cleverly disguised in a lemon yellow dustcover.