The title of my project Artist in the House on the artist Ann Mary Severn Newton and the world she lived in is an obvious nod to Coventry Patmore’s poem The Angel in the House (Book One published in 1854 and Book Two in 1856). The poem about the love, courtship and marriage of Felix Vaughan and Honoria Churchill is loosely based on Patmore’s own marriage to Emily Augusta Andrews, who was herself a writer (under the name Mrs Motherly) and daughter of the clergyman who taught Greek to the critic and writer John Ruskin. Unusually for girls’ education in the period, Emily was taught Greek and Latin too. She is now better known for being a muse to her husband and some of the Pre-Raphaelite artists. The poem establishes a pattern of domestic bliss in which the wife is a passive, if gifted, helpmate, for example:
Man must be pleased; but him to please
Is woman's pleasure; down the gulf
Of his condoled necessities
She casts her best, she flings herself.
‘A Wife’s Tragedy’, Canto IX, Sahara’s Prelude.
This Angel is more well known today for being killed by Virginia Woolf in her speech in 1931 and subsequent essay on women’s professions. To write and review men’s work in particular, Woolf said, she had to kill the Angel in the House, who crept up to her pen to tell her to amuse, to flatter, to beguile. Laura Elkin points put that Woolf first came up with this idea while having a long bath and wanted it to be about the sexual life of women as well as their professional life as the two were intertwined.
In 1972 Elaine Showalter picked up on Woolf’s murderous impulse to outline women’s writing in contrast to that of the more established male writers on the canon of English Literature and so The Angel in the House became an anti-feminist icon. Although it was in truth seen as such by feminists in the English Women’s Journal when it was reviewed in its books’ pages soon after publication - writers in the 20thC often take credit where Victorian feminists once trod. I first gave a talk on Ann Mary Severn under the title Artist in the House at a conference on Ruskin in Venice in 2008 – I choose it then for that feminist play on the domestic versus professional angel.
In 2019 I worked with singer and actress Lucy Stevens on getting seed funding from the Being Human Festival for her production of Killing the Angel, which combined Woolf’s biographical writing with songs by female composers of the time – including Woolf’s friend Ethel Smyth. I worked with Lucy on a part performance in November 2019 in the Shaw Library at LSE and then a filming of the show in 2021 for YouTube (due to Covid restrictions). It has since been performed before an audience there and elsewhere and a copy of the script with a useful introduction is available. Part of this involved having a ‘rummage’ in the Women’s Library archives at LSE Library and was so excited when I found an invite to the original lecture at Woolf first delivered her speech on Literature as a Profession for women in a cuttings book. For me, it also showed how archives, public events (often seen as ephemeral) and creative performance can merge for something profound and lasting.
I choose the title for this creative development project (now funded by Arts Council England) both due to the play on an anti-feminist icon and as Mary’s husband Charles Newton did not want her ‘to work for money’. The poem quotes Honoria occasionally but mostly gives her no voice, she is ‘dumb’ in her love and delights to hear herself praised. Mary does have a voice in her letters and her art, yet it has rarely been heard. I also choose the title as the poem is domestic and realistic in detail – reading Petrarch on a train to London for example – as is Mary in her letters on buying paintbrushes or gloves and her humorous cartoons of her chaotic Severn family life, then struggling with house-keeping or learning Greek in her married life. The sinister (read rapey) undertones in the poem of a chase and women being conquered also underlined the danger for Mary as a loan female artist painting portraits in houses and elsewhere; for example, she was forcibly kissed by a tutor (actually my research has found it likely that it was probably the son of a Master) at Eton. She had to guard her reputation as her father, also an artist and who had fathered an illegitimate child, made clear. In 1856, Joseph wrote:
the one important thing is that I don’t think Mary’s manner to her young men sitters is quite the thing (angel as she is) to save her & insure her from the world’s worst word (No 128, Scott, 2005).
Angel as she is, she must always work harder.
Work cited:
LSE Archives – the Women’s Library Collection. The Junior Council of the London and National Society for Women's Service: https://archives.lse.ac.uk/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=2LSW%2fJ&pos=2Scott, Grant F. (2005), Joseph Severn. Letters and Memoirs
Elkin, Laura (2023), Art Monsters. Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art
Showalter, E. (1992). Killing the Angel in the House: The Autonomy of Women Writers. In The Antioch review (Vol. 50, Number 1/2, pp. 207–220). Antioch Review, Inc. https://doi.org/10.2307/4612511
Stevens, Lucy (2022), Killing the Angel
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