The Angel in the House

The life of a high or middle class woman in the Victorian Era can be described as a possession or a treasure of the family. Women were mainly for love interest and they were purity. Women were respected so they could not be used for pleasurable sex and physical exertion. The main career for women during that time was to get married and take care of chores in the house. Parents who had daughters were eager to have their daughters get married.

From Wikipedia:

The Angel in the House is a narrative poem by Coventry Patmore, first published in 1854 and expanded until 1862. Although largely ignored upon publication, it became enormously popular in the United States during the later 19th century and then in Britain, and its influence continued well into the twentieth century as it became part of many English Literature courses once adopted by W. W. Norton & Companyinto The Norton Anthology of English Literature. The poem was an idealized account of Patmore’s courtship of his first wife, Emily Augusta Andrews (1824-1862), whom he married in 1847 and believed to be the perfect woman. According to Carol Christ, it is not a very good poem, “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.