Still, my mother applauded Virginia Woolf’s critique of nineteenth-century family life. In class, she’d parse the writer’s disdain for the Victorian ideal of the “Angel of the House,” obedient, pure, self-sacrificing. At home, she’d press a copy of A Room of One’s Own on me with touching urgency, echoing Woolf’s call to young women “to go about the business of life,” to shuck off the provincialism of confinement in drawing rooms and family life because “no human being should shut out the view.”
