The thing about a really good piece of writing is that it surprises you every time you return to it, no matter how well you think you know it. I realized this as I was drafting the opening chapters of my book Art Monsters, which was meant to explore the ways in which women’s professional lives as artists are shaped by their gender.
The obvious corollary to the art monster was, it seemed to me, the angel in the house, the Victorian feminine ideal that Virginia Woolf takes aim at in her 1931 speech, Professions for Women (posthumously published in 1942). The angel sat by young Virginia’s side as she wrote her first essays, slipping dangerous ideas into her ear, ideas about obedience, modesty, purity. Woolf realized her writing career depended on ridding herself of this unwanted guide, so, she writes, she hurled a bottle of ink at her head. “Had I not killed her she would have killed me,” she writes. “She would have plucked the heart out of my writing.”
