Killing the Angel in the House

For a bloke like me, who knows little of the history of feminism and the struggle for women's equality, this little book was a wonderful primer. It certainly made me think how men have suppressed women, about the drudgery of the life of a housewife, particularly in low-paid, working-class households in industrial England. I would not say I am a feminist but I am closer to being one after reading what Virginia Woolf has to say on the matter of women in the first half of the Twentieth Century. I certainly recommend that men read this little book.

This is described as "seven essays" by Woolf, but that's not really accurate. There's a lecture, a couple of reviews, letters to the editor. The title comes from a poem by Coventry Patmore, "The Angel in the House", a lengthy narrative poem that presented an ideal of marital bliss in which the wife was self-sacrificing, pure, submissive.

"Man must be pleased; but him to please
Is woman's pleasure . . ."

Woolf did not approve!

Important essays from an important author and a feminist.