Previously: Virginia Woolf, Beloved Chinese Novelist. "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…

There are some idioms in this great big English language of ours that sound a great deal more exciting than they have any right to be. "The Angel in the House" is one of them. You've almost certainly heard of it, even if it's not a phrase you find occasion to regularly deploy; you're on a website for excitable and bookish women. The popular Victorian image of the ideal wife/woman came to be "the…