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Who Actually Killed the “Angel in the House”? Love, War and Independence in Zofia Nałkowska and Virginia Woolf

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: In “Professions for women”, a 1931 speech originally intended as a sequel to a Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf sets out to kill the “angel in the house”, a metaphor taken from a poem by Coventry Palmore, who she felt haunted Victorian England and prevented women from having “a mind of their own”. What kind of “Angel in the house” can be found in Central European literatures at the same period, and to what extent are they caught between the dynamics of emancipation and sequestration, or even persecution? The aim of this paper is to answer this question using texts by Zofia Nałkowska (in particular Romans Teresa Hennert, 1924) and, to a lesser extent, Milena Jesenská (in particular “Ďábel u krbu”, Narodní listy, 1923), in order to highlight the tension between feminist thought and female condition.

Source: Human Affairs

DOI: 10.1515/humaff-2024-0077

Author: Hélène Martinelli

Institutions: École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Institut d'Histoire des Représentations et des Idées dans les Modernités, Centre Français de Recherche en Sciences Sociales

Language: English

Topic: Central European Literary Studies

Subfield: Anthropology

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Gender equality

Open Access status: green

OpenAlex ID: W4408901753

FWCI:

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