Elaine Showalter (Essay Date 1973)

SOURCE: Showalter, Elaine. "Killing the Angel in the House: The Autonomy of Women Writers." Antioch Review 32, no. 3 (1973): 339-53.

In the following essay, Showalter reflects on the growth of writing from a feminist perspective, focusing on women's issues and emotional expression in women's writing in the twentieth century, briefly discussing the works of various authors, including Virginia Woolf, Mary McCarthy, Sylvia Plath, Erica Jong, and Elizabeth Sargent.

Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.

—Virginia Woolf

In a paper called "Professions for Women," read to the Women's Service League in 1931, Virginia Woolf recalled two crises of her professional life: fighting off the spectre of Victorian respectability she ironically named the Angel in the House (after the self-sacrificing heroine of Coventry Patmore's popular verse-novel); and struggling to find the courage to "tell the truth about my own experiences...