Killing The Angel: Early British Transgressive Woman Writers

By francisbooth and Francis Booth

Virginia Woolf said a woman writer had first to kill the Angel in the House. This book is about British women writers who comprehensively killed the Angel in their own house, who transgressed the expectations placed upon the women of their time by learning to read, learning languages, learning to think for themselves, enjoying the company of other, equally transgressive women, studying and translating contemporary European literature and the male classics of the patriarchive, often for money, transgressing the unspoken prohibition against women being professional writers and, most transgressive of all, daring to publish their own original writings under their own names.

Virginia Woolf said 'nothing is known about women before the eighteenth century,' and in her time nothing much was. But we know a lot more these days about those early transgressive women, the foremothers of contemporary women writers, the creators of the still-emerging matriarchive. As Woolf said, 'Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontës and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue.'

Killing the Angel weaves an Ariadne's thread, connecting together some of these British women writers, from the earliest days of the English language to the end of the eighteenth century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wu Wei Press
• Release date: Jun 29, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224415281

Book preview

Killing the Angel

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You who come of a younger and happier generation may not have heard of her – you may not know what I mean by the Angel in the House. 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 chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it – in 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. . . And when I came to write I encountered her with the very first words. The shadow of her wings fell on my page; I heard the rustling of her skirts in the room. . . Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.

Virginia Woolf, Professions for Women

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Virginia Wool said a woman writer had first to kill the Angel in the House. This book is about British women writers who comprehensively killed the Angel in their own house, who transgressed the expectations placed upon the women of their time by learning to read, learning languages, learning to think for themselves, enjoying the company of other, equally transgressive women, studying and translating contemporary European literature and the male classics of the patriarchive, often for money, transgressing the unspoken prohibition against women being professional writers and, most transgressive of all, daring to publish their own original writings under their own names.

Virginia Woolf said ‘nothing is known about women before the eighteenth century,’ and in her time nothing much was. But we know a lot more these days about those early transgressive women, the foremothers of contemporary women writers, the creators of the still-emerging matriarchive. As Woolf said, ‘Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontës and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue.’

Killing the Angel weaves an Ariadne’s thread, connecting together some of these British women writers, from the earliest days of the English language to the end of the eighteenth century.

Transgressive Women

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According to the Bible the first transgression on earth was committed by the first woman on Earth: Eve, who ate the forbidden fruit and transgressed God’s will. The biblical Eve soon learned her lesson however; she became obedient to God and her husband and never transgressed again as far as we know. It was too late though; the whole of mankind and womankind has had to pay for her original sin. Or not: we will shortly meet several women writers who vigorously disputed this idea of Eve.

In the Gnostic tradition Eve was Adam’s second wife, the good wife. She had been preceded by Adam’s very transgressive bad wife Lilith, ‘the witch he loved before the gift of Eve,’ according to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poem about her. Lilith refused to obey her husband and refused to lay underneath him in the missionary position. She left him and went off to become a succubus, stealing men’s semen and abducting children; about as transgressive as a woman can get.

Out of her cave came the ancient Lilith; Lilith the wise; Lilith the enchantress. There ran a little path outside her dwelling; it wound away among the mountains and glittering peaks, and before the door one of the Wise Ones walked to and fro. Out of her cave came Lilith, scornful of his solitude, exultant in her wisdom, flaunting her shining and magical beauty.

‘Still alone, star gazer! Is thy wisdom of no avail? Thou hast yet to learn that I am more powerful, knowing the ways of error, than you who know the ways of truth.’

AE The Cave of Lilith

Several male authors have written about Lilith – half in love with her, half scared of her: the beautiful but deceitful transgressive temptress who will seduce and betray any man she wants. Aleister Crowley, the Great Beast 666 himself, wrote his book Lilith in such ambivalent terms.

Ah! Were those virgin lips of thine polluted with some rank savour of Sabbatic lust?

What spell turned thee, the maiden, to a monkey jabbering antiphonal blasphemies

To those chaste chants I wooed thee by, the moment that touching thee, my fruit dissolved to dust,

Fair-seeming Sodom-apple! Yet thy kisses smote all my spine to shuddering ecstasies!

What woman would not love to be called a fair-seeming Sodom-apple? The medieval Jewish mystical text Zohar also refers to Lilith as the original transgressive woman.

Approaching the earthly Garden of Eden, she sees cherubs guarding the gates of the Garden, and she dwells there by that flaming sword, for she emerged from the side of that flame. As the flame revolves she flees and roams the world, finding children who deserved to be punished. She toys with them and kills them.

Very transgressive. In other myths of origin the woes of the world are also attributed to a woman not doing as she was told by men. In Greek myth everything was perfect until Pandora opened a jar containing nothing but trouble. As Hesiod described the event:

For ere this the tribes of men lived on earth remote and free from ills and hard toil and heavy sickness which bring the Fates upon men; for in misery men grow old quickly. But the woman took off the great lid of the jar with her hands and scattered all these and her thought caused sorrow and mischief to men.

From her is the race of women and female kind: of her is the deadly race and tribe of women who live amongst mortal men to their great trouble, no helpmates in hateful poverty, but only in wealth.

Often in early myth it is women’s lust that is seen as men’s downfall, especially when the woman is said to be a witch or a sexually predatory goddess like Athena or Lilith. Female lust was always – until very recently and perhaps still today – seen in patriarchal societies as being transgressive but sometimes it led to unspeakably transgressive acts: in Cretan mythology – from which we get Europa, the first European – the witch Pasiphaë lusts after a bull, though only because she has herself been bewitched. She has a wooden frame built to resemble a cow so she can hide in it while the bull penetrates her; her lust transgresses even the species barrier. Also transgressing that barrier was the sorceress Circe, who turned Odysseus’ crew into swine, though thankfully not for sexual purposes.

Other transgressive ancient Greek women include Helen of Troy, who caused a catastrophic war; Medea, who killed her children; Clytemnestra, who killed her husband, and Clytemnestra’s daughter Electra, who plotted to kill her mother and stepfather in revenge. There was also Antigone, daughter of the incest between Oedipus and his mother who broke the law because she wanted to bury her brother, and Lysistrata, who led the world’s first sex strike by women. And of course in Greek myth, Amazons, Harpies, Fates, Furies, Gorgons, Maenads and Sirens were all female and were all a threat to peace and patriarchal order.

In India, although Hinduism has much-loved gentle goddesses like Sita, Laksmi and Saraswati, as well as the equally-loved, semi-divine Sakuntala, mother of India’s founder Bharat (of the Mahabharata), it also has fierce, relentless goddesses like Kali and Durga. However, as in Tibetan or Tantric Buddhism, which has Penden Lhamo, Rachigma and Troma, the fierce warrior goddesses are a threat mostly to evil male deities rather than ordinary people.

Going back to the Christian Bible we have Delilah, who cut off Samson’s hair to rob him of his strength and we also have two women who went even further and cut off men’s heads – surely the most transgressive thing a woman can do: Judith, who cut off the head of Holofernes before he had chance to rape her – a scene lovingly painted by, among many others, pioneering woman artist Artemisia Gentileschi, herself named after Artemisia, the warrior Queen of Caria – and the highly transgressive Salome, who seduced her stepfather in front of her mother so that she could have the severed head of John the Baptist, who had spurned her – a story lasciviously retold by Oscar Wilde and sensuously set to music by Richard Strauss.

Daemonologie

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Transgressive women have often been called witches. They have allegedly always been with us, transgressing peaceful society at least since the time of the Old Testament: Exodus says, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,’ the first of several references to witchcraft in the Old Testament.

There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son, or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch.

Deuteronomy Ch. 18

For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry: because thou hast rejected the word of the Lord, he hath also rejected thee from being king.

First Book of Samuel Ch. 15

And I will cut off witchcrafts out of thine hand, and thou shalt have no more Soothsayers

Book of Micah Ch. 5

Accusations of witchcraft were a common way of subjugating women, as even pre-feminist female writers noted.

Whatever the pretext made for witchcraft persecution we have abundant proof that the so-called ‘witch’ was among the most profoundly scientific persons of the age. The church having forbidden its offices and all external methods of knowledge to woman, was profoundly stirred with indignation at her having through her own wisdom, penetrated into some of the most deeply subtle secrets of nature: and it was a subject of debate during the middle ages if learning for woman was not an additional capacity for evil, as owing to her, knowledge had first been introduced in the world. In penetrating into these arcana, woman trenched upon that mysterious hidden knowledge of the church which it regarded as among its most potential methods of controlling mankind. 

Matilda Joslyn Gage, Woman, Church and State, 1893

The belief in witches persisted for centuries; the Witchcraft Act in England was passed in 1563, when Elizabeth I was newly on the throne and was not repealed until 1951, shortly before Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, about the so-called Salem witches: young women who were supposed to have done harm to men by using sympathetic magic, creating ‘poppets,’ replicas of the person they wanted to hurt.

The witch was seen as transgressive, but she was thought not to do the harm of herself, just to be a conduit for a demon, with whom she may have had sex as an incubus. Witches could also be succubi, stealing men’s semen in their sleep like Lilith. People believed in this absolutely, and not just uneducated, superstitious people. King James I of England commissioned others to write what we now call the King James Bible, but he had previously written a book on witches, Dæmonologie, himself, discussing among other things their use of poppets.

To some others at these times he teacheth how to make Pictures of wax or clay: That by the roasting thereof, the persons that they bear the name of, may be continually melted or dried away by continual sickness.

The witches in the Salem trials and in many of the similar trials in Europe were young women or girls, but the popular image of a witch is of an old and ugly woman.

One sort of such as are said to be witches, are women which be commonly old, lame, bleary-eyed, pale, foul, and full of wrinkles; poor, sullen, superstitious, and papists; or such as know no religion: in whose drowsy minds the devil hath gotten a fine seat; so as, what mischief, mischance, calamity, or slaughter is brought to pass, they are easily persuaded the same is done by themselves; imprinting in their minds an earnest and constant imagination thereof. They are lean and deformed, shewing melancholy in their faces, to the horror of all that see them. They are doting, scolds, mad, devilish.

Reginald Scott, The Discovery of Witchcraft

For hundreds of years any woman who did not look, dress and behave as men thought she should could be accused of being a witch: between 1482 and 1782, around a hundred thousand women across Europe were accused of witchcraft, and some forty to fifty thousand were executed for transgressions they didn’t commit.

Mediaeval Mystics

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We saw that women who didn’t fit the norm – transgressive women – were for a long time considered to be witches. If a witch supposedly dedicated herself to the devil then her opposite was a nun, who dedicated herself to God. But some senior nuns in the later middle ages wrote books – a transgressive act of itself for any woman at that time but even more so for one who had taken vows of obedience to a patriarchal religion. And worse, they often transgressed orthodox religious views. Literally cloistered in female communities and away from the control of men these religious women expressed deeply personal views in a way they would never have been allowed to do in the outside world. Of course any male priest, however junior, could give orders to any female nun, even an abbess, but in practice some convents were large and powerful; their abbesses were often highly literate and some communicated – discreetly – on equal terms with scholars around Europe in Latin even though the mere learning of Latin was transgressive for a woman.

Some medieval abbesses wrote about