Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-c4f8m Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T05:55:34.477Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

THE REALISM OF THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE: COVENTRY PATMORE’S POEM RECONSIDERED

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2015

Natasha Moore
Natasha Moore*
Affiliation:
Centre for Public Christianity, Sydney
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

“The Angel in the House is not a very good poem,” writes Carol Christ, “yet it is culturally significant, not only for its definition of the sexual ideal, but also for the clarity with which it represents the male concerns that motivate fascination with that ideal” (147). Her pronouncement is strongly emblematic of recent approaches to Coventry Patmore's best-known poem. The Angel, it is asserted or implied, almost never receives a full or attentive reading now, and does not reward one; it would long since have sunk into obscurity were it not for the unforeseen appropriation of its title as a repository for the prevailing Victorian conception of womanhood; as a text it belongs more properly to the domain of cultural history or gender studies than literary criticism. A renewed scholarly interest in the technical experimentation of Patmore's later volume The Unknown Eros (1877) has done little to challenge this view, largely defining itself against the dull conventionality of the earlier work.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , March 2015 , pp. 41 - 61
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

The Angel in the House by Coventry Patmore: A facsimile of the first editions of the first two books of the poem. London: Haggerston, with Boston College, 1998.Google Scholar
“The Angel in the House: The Espousals.” Harvard Magazine 2 (1856): 412–25.Google Scholar
Rev. of The Angel in the House. Eclectic Review 9 (1855): 546–56.Google Scholar
Anstruther, Ian.Coventry Patmore's Angel: A Study of Coventry Patmore, His Wife Emily and The Angel in the House. London: Haggerston, 1992.Google Scholar
Auerbach, Nina. Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982.Google Scholar
[Barnes, William]. “Patmore's Poems.” Fraser's Magazine 68 (July 1863): 130–34.Google Scholar
The Book of Common Prayer: Standard Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.Google Scholar
Bradley, A. C. “The Long Poem in the Age of Wordsworth.” Oxford Lectures on Poetry. London: Macmillan, 1959. 177–208.Google Scholar
Christ, Carol. “Victorian Masculinity and the Angel in the House.” A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women. Ed. Vicinus, Martha. London: Methuen, 1980.Google Scholar
Clough, Arthur Hugh. “Recent English Poetry: A Review of Several Volumes of Poems by Alexander Smith, Matthew Arnold, and Others.” Selected Prose Works of Arthur Hugh Clough. Ed. Trawick, Buckner B.. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1964.Google Scholar
Collins, Wilkie. Basil. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.Google Scholar
Day Lewis, C.The Poetic Image. London: Jonathan Cape, 1947.Google Scholar
[de Vere, Aubrey]. “The Angel in the House.” Edinburgh Review 107 (1858): 121–33.Google Scholar
Evans, B. Ifor.English Poetry in the Later Nineteenth Century. London: Methuen, 1933. Rev. of Faithful for Ever. Critic 20 Oct 1860: 479–80.Google Scholar
Freiwald, Bina. “Of Selfsame Desire: Patmore's The Angel in the House.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 30 (Winter 1988): 538–61.Google Scholar
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Gubar, Susan. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1984.Google Scholar
House, Humphry. “Pre-Raphaelite Poetry” (BBC Third Programme, 1948). Pre-Raphaelitism: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Sambrook, James. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1974.Google Scholar
Kingsley, Charles. Alton Locke: Tailor and Poet, an Autobiography. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1983.Google Scholar
Lowry, Howard Foster, ed. The Letters of Matthew Arnold to A. H. Clough. London: Oxford UP, 1932.Google Scholar
Maynard, John. Victorian Discourses on Sexuality and Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Meynell, Alice. “Introduction.” The Angel in the House together with the Victories of Love. London: Routledge, [1906].Google Scholar
“Minor Minstrels.” Athenaeum 20 Jan. 1855: 76.Google Scholar
“Mr. Coventry Patmore's Poems.” National Review 6 (1858): 188–98.Google Scholar
Patmore, Coventry. The Angel in the House together with the Victories of Love. “Introduction” by Meynell, Alice. London: Routledge, [1906].Google Scholar
Patmore, Coventry. Rev. of Aurora Leigh. North British Review 26 (1857): 443–62.Google Scholar
Patmore, Coventry. “New Poets.” Edinburgh Review 104 (1856): 337–62.Google Scholar
Patmore, Coventry. Principle in Art, Religio Poetae and Other Essays. London: Duckworth, 1889.Google Scholar
Patmore, Coventry. “William Barnes, The Dorsetshire Poet.” Macmillan's Magazine 6 (June 1862): 154–63.Google Scholar
“Poems by Coventry Patmore.” North British Review 28 (1858): 529–45.Google Scholar
Read, Herbert. In Defence of Shelley and Other Essays. London: W. Heinemann, 1936.Google Scholar
Reid, J. C.The Mind and Art of Coventry Patmore. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957.Google Scholar
Reynolds, Margaret, ed. Aurora Leigh. New York: Norton, 1996.Google Scholar
Showalter, Elaine. “Killing the Angel in the House: The Autonomy of Women Writers.” Antioch Review 32 (Autumn 1972): 339–53.Google Scholar
[Sterling, John]. Rev. of Poems (1842). Quarterly Review 70 (1842): 385–416.Google Scholar
Super, R. H., ed. The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold. Vol I. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1960.Google Scholar
Symons, Arthur. Studies in Two Literatures. London: Martin Secker, 1924.Google Scholar
Tennyson: The Critical Heritage. Ed. John Jump. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967. 103–25.Google Scholar
Weinig, Sister Mary Anthony. Coventry Patmore. Boston: Twayne, 1981.Google Scholar