Killing the Angel

1 Killing the Angel

You who come of a younger and happier generation may not have heard of her – you may not know what I mean by the Angel in the House. I will describe her as shortly as I can. She was intensely sympathetic.

She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it – in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all – I need not say it – she was pure. . . And when I came to write I encountered her with the very first words. The shadow of her wings fell on my page; I heard the rustling of her skirts in the room. . . Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.

Virginia Woolf, Professions for Women

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This book is about British women writers who comprehensively killed the Angel in their own house, who transgressed the expectations placed upon the women of their time by learning to read, learning languages, learning to think for themselves, enjoying the company of other, equally transgressive women, studying and translating contemporary European literature and the male classics of the patriarchive, often for money, transgressing the unspoken prohibition against women being professional writers and, most transgressive of all, daring to publish their own original writings under their own names.

Virginia Woolf said ‘nothing is known about women before the eighteenth century,’ and in her time nothing much was. But we know a lot more these days about those early transgressive women, the foremothers of contemporary women writers, the creators of the still-emerging matriarchive. As Woolf said, ‘Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontës and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue.’

Killing the Angel weaves an Ariadne’s thread, connecting together some of these British women writers, from the earliest days of the English language to the end of the eighteenth century.

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