Margaret Horsfield began her personal odyssey through the broom closet door with a fight about housework. When the dust settled, the British Columbia-based contributor to The Guardian, CBC, and BBC radio turned her considerable research skill from biblical scholarship to cleaning. She wanted to know how routine chores can be the source of both acute animosity and private pleasure.

In her quest for answers, Horsfield looks to literary icons, from Susannah Moodie to Margaret Atwood. She explores feminist theory and social history. She consults household angels dating back to 1841, tracing a tidy line from Mrs. Beeton to Martha Stewart. What emerges is an engaging thematic distillation of why middle-class women in the Western world approach cleaning the way we do. Horsfield shows how family influences, social factors, science, and advertising conspire to keep us scrubbing for our lives.

While Horsfield generally maintains a journalist’s objectivity and attention to captivating story-telling, she is not immune to the traps of the domestic science writing she deplores. A chapter on the popularization of germ theory turns briefly into a how-to-actually-kill-bacteria instruction manual. A token chapter on men and cleaning is predictably full of the same old gripes, although it makes the interesting point that men generally clean to please themselves, not others. And Horsfield’s historical survey of cleaning books – while extensive and full of amusing facts – leads to the puzzling assertion that none of these early domestic scientists address the monotony of homemaking, when, in fact, many offer fascinating, even subversive, treatments of this very issue.

Fortunately, however, Horsfield keeps a firm grip on her narrative, preventing occasional bouts of advice-giving or polemic from becoming fatal flaws. Biting the Dust, in the end, is a welcome examination of the prosaic in women’s lives – polished to a life-affirming shine.