The Angel in the House is a narrative poem

by Coventry Patmore, first published in 1854

and expanded up until 1862. Although largely
ignored upon publication, it became
enormously popular during the later nineteenth
century and its influence continued well into
the twentieth. The poem was an idealised
account of Patmore's courtship of his first
wife, Emily, whom he believed to be the
perfect woman. Following the publication of Patmore's poem, the
term angel in the house came to be used in reference to women who
embodied the Victorian feminine ideal: a wife and mother who was
selflessly devoted to her children and submissive to her husband.
Later feminist writers have had a less positive view of the Angel.
Virginia Woolf satirized the ideal of femininity depicted in the poem,
writing that "She [the perfect wife] was intensely sympathetic. She
was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in
the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed daily. If there was a
chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it ... Above
all, she was pure." (Woolf, 1966: 2, 285) She added that she "bothered
me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her"
(Woolf, 1966: 2, 285). Nel Noddings views her as "infantile, weak
and mindless" (1989: 59). Similarly, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote
a short essay entitled The Extinct Angel in which she described the
angel in the house as being as dead as the dodo (Gilman, 1891: 200).