ABSTRACT
In a lecture entitled “Professions for Women,” Virginia Woolf looks back on her beginnings as a writer:
I discovered that if I were going to review books I should need to do battle with a certain phantom. And the phantom was a woman, and when I came to know her better I called her after the heroine of a famous poem, “The Angel in the House.” It was she who used to come between me and my paper when I was writing reviews. It was she who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her. 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 a chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in itin 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 . . . In those days-the last of Queen Victoria-every house had its Angel. And when I came to write . . . [t]he shadow of her wings fell on my page.
