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

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.