Authorial Angels: Writing and Masculinity in Thackeray’s The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Claims Thackeray’s ideal of authorship presented in The English Humourists rejects the fierce masculinity of Carlyle’s Great Man in favor of feminine tenderness. Thackeray also rejects the critical ethos that privileges high art produced by isolated geniuses. Suggests Thackeray embraces a male version of the Angel in the House role that Virginia Woolf blames for inhibiting women’s writing, but also acknowledges the unsatisfactory, even destructive, domestic lives of the angelic figures he describes, believing the angelic function is more easily fulfilled through writing than through actual human relationships.