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Angel
Perhaps every novelist harbors a monster at heart, an irrepressible and utterly irresponsible fantasist, not to mention a born and ingenious liar, without which all her art would go for naught. Angel, at any rate, is the story of such a monster. Angelica Deverell lives above her diligent, drab mother’s grocery shop in a dreary turn-of-the-century English neighborhood, but spends her days dreaming of handsome Paradise House, where her aunt is enthroned as a maid. But in Angel’s imagination, she is the mistress of the house, a realm of lavish opulence, of evening gowns and peacocks. Then she begins to write popular novels, and this fantasy becomes her life. And now that she has tasted success, Angel has no intention of letting anyone stand in her way—except, perhaps, herself.
272 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1957
194 people are currently reading
9471 people want to read
About the author
Elizabeth Taylor
69 books520 followersElizabeth Taylor (née Coles) was a popular English novelist and short story writer. Elizabeth Coles was born in Reading, Berkshire in 1912. She was educated at The Abbey School, Reading, and worked as a governess, as a tutor and as a librarian.
In 1936, she married John William Kendall Taylor, a businessman. She lived in Penn, Buckinghamshire, for almost all her married life.
Her first novel, At Mrs. Lippincote's, was published in 1945 and was followed by eleven more. Her short stories were published in various magazines and collected in four volumes. She also wrote a children's book.
Taylor's work is mainly concerned with the nuances of "everyday" life and situations, which she writes about with dexterity. Her shrewd but affectionate portrayals of middle class and upper middle class English life won her an audience of discriminating readers, as well as loyal friends in the world of letters.
She was a friend of the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett and of the novelist and critic Robert Liddell.
Elizabeth Taylor died at age 63 of cancer.
Anne Tyler once compared Taylor to Jane Austen, Barbara Pym and Elizabeth Bowen -- "soul sisters all," in Tyler's words . In recent years new interest has been kindled by movie makers in her work. French director Francois Ozon, has made "The Real Life of Angel Deverell" which will be released in early 2005. American director Dan Ireland's screen adaptation of Taylor's "Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont" came out in this country first in 2006 and has made close to $1 million. A British distributor picked it up at Cannes, and the movie was released in England in 2009.
In 1936, she married John William Kendall Taylor, a businessman. She lived in Penn, Buckinghamshire, for almost all her married life.
Her first novel, At Mrs. Lippincote's, was published in 1945 and was followed by eleven more. Her short stories were published in various magazines and collected in four volumes. She also wrote a children's book.
Taylor's work is mainly concerned with the nuances of "everyday" life and situations, which she writes about with dexterity. Her shrewd but affectionate portrayals of middle class and upper middle class English life won her an audience of discriminating readers, as well as loyal friends in the world of letters.
She was a friend of the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett and of the novelist and critic Robert Liddell.
Elizabeth Taylor died at age 63 of cancer.
Anne Tyler once compared Taylor to Jane Austen, Barbara Pym and Elizabeth Bowen -- "soul sisters all," in Tyler's words . In recent years new interest has been kindled by movie makers in her work. French director Francois Ozon, has made "The Real Life of Angel Deverell" which will be released in early 2005. American director Dan Ireland's screen adaptation of Taylor's "Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont" came out in this country first in 2006 and has made close to $1 million. A British distributor picked it up at Cannes, and the movie was released in England in 2009.
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April 13, 2020
***Just to be clear there are two Elizabeth Taylors. One is the famous actress, and the other is the British writer. Elizabeth Taylor the writer has been mentioned by several accomplished writers as one of the most underrated writers of the 20th century. Let’s do something about that, shall we?***
Elizabeth Taylor
”It seems to me that what Elizabeth Taylor does is to de-romanticise the process of writing and show it to us close up, so that we are aware of that if ten percent of the process is exhilaration, the rest is tedium, backache and fear of failure; that, whatever the impulse to art, however little or great the gift, a cast-iron vanity and a will to power are needed to sustain it. Writers are monsters, she is telling us; how else would you be reading this book?”
---Hilary Mantel from the Introduction to Angel
Angelica Deverell grows up in a small set of rooms over her mom’s shop. She may have live there, but she is never really there. In her mind, everything is transformed around her. Her drab dress is a beautiful gown. The worn furniture is transformed into opulent grand settees, fringed lamps, and ornate wood chifforobes. Reality is too limiting.
Angel discovers, when writing an essay for school, that while she is pouring out her thoughts onto paper is the only time she can ever remember being happy. You would think such a girl would be a reader, but there is one hangup about books that makes them impossible for her to read them. ”She had never cared much for books, because they did not seem to be about her, and she thought that she would rather write a book herself, to a pattern of her own choosing and about a beautiful young girl with a startling white skin, heiress to great property, wearing white pique at Osborne and tartan taffetas at Balmoral.”
It is madness, really, to think that a seventeen year old girl, with little to no personal experience, with no real knowledge of the day to day activities of people, could write an epic novel about duchesses, counts, and the wealthy elite, and yet she does. She finds the perfect publisher, Theo Gilbright, who sees so many issues with her book, but when he discusses making a few minor changes, like champagne being opened with a corkscrew, she refuses. That is how she saw it in her head, and that it is how it must remain.
Theo’s partner thinks he is barmy for publishing the book, and the book becomes a smashing success. As many writers will attest, it goes to show what publishers or editors know about readers. How many publishers passed on Harry Potter? The list is not short.
Edward Gibbon may have written The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but Elizabeth Taylor wrote The Rise and Fall of Angelica Deverell. At the height of her success, Angel receives a visit from Nora Howe-Nevinson, an amateur poet, who is a huge fan of her books. As important as Nora is going to prove to be to Angel, she has only eyes for Nora’s brother Esme. He is the perfect wastrel for a rich woman to fall in love with.
”He had so often taken the initiative in life, without the reserves to back up his actions; he was always withdrawing from absurd forays he should never have set out on. The emotions he had inspired in other people were not peaceful ones, adoration turned into contempt, desire to jealous anger. His life had been hindered by his beauty and the adventures it had permitted him.”
He is a painter by trade, maybe even a good one, but to be good and be known takes lots of effort and more than a bit of luck, and Esme is blessed with neither of those qualities in sizeable amounts.
He does see the majestic qualities about Angel that few can really see.
”The blue-black hair lay against her cream-coloured arms; the skin under her armpits was a deeper colour, of a shade near apricot. With his eyes half-closed he tried to set limits to the picture he saw, as if he were going to paint her as she sat upright among the tumbled bedclothes and the crumpled pillows. The raven hair was a wonderful contrast to the gradations of white through cream to warm yellow. He studied the textures of the linen with its grey shadows and her skin with its golden lights. He sat and considered her, trying to see her afresh, wondering what she was like, as he had often wondered when they were first acquainted.”
Now that is a painting I would buy, but Esme never paints it. He fritters away his days doing anything but lifting a paint brush. Angel is hard to like. Compliments from her are few and far between. She is emotionally stunted, and keeps everyone a pole length away. She is rude, too honest, and difficult to please. When a person builds glittering sand castles in her mind, the real world is a very dull and dreary place. For all of her issues, I can’t help marveling at her dedication to writing and her devotion to the worlds she creates.
There are epic female characters in literature like Miss Havisham, Jane Eyre, Scarlett O’Hara, Lisbeth Salander, and Mrs. Danvers. Angel shares characteristics of all these women, and certainly she will join my list of greatest female literary creations who will always inspire me with their greatness and their human frailties.
Oh yes, more Elizabeth Taylor please.
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
Elizabeth Taylor
”It seems to me that what Elizabeth Taylor does is to de-romanticise the process of writing and show it to us close up, so that we are aware of that if ten percent of the process is exhilaration, the rest is tedium, backache and fear of failure; that, whatever the impulse to art, however little or great the gift, a cast-iron vanity and a will to power are needed to sustain it. Writers are monsters, she is telling us; how else would you be reading this book?”
---Hilary Mantel from the Introduction to Angel
Angelica Deverell grows up in a small set of rooms over her mom’s shop. She may have live there, but she is never really there. In her mind, everything is transformed around her. Her drab dress is a beautiful gown. The worn furniture is transformed into opulent grand settees, fringed lamps, and ornate wood chifforobes. Reality is too limiting.
Angel discovers, when writing an essay for school, that while she is pouring out her thoughts onto paper is the only time she can ever remember being happy. You would think such a girl would be a reader, but there is one hangup about books that makes them impossible for her to read them. ”She had never cared much for books, because they did not seem to be about her, and she thought that she would rather write a book herself, to a pattern of her own choosing and about a beautiful young girl with a startling white skin, heiress to great property, wearing white pique at Osborne and tartan taffetas at Balmoral.”
It is madness, really, to think that a seventeen year old girl, with little to no personal experience, with no real knowledge of the day to day activities of people, could write an epic novel about duchesses, counts, and the wealthy elite, and yet she does. She finds the perfect publisher, Theo Gilbright, who sees so many issues with her book, but when he discusses making a few minor changes, like champagne being opened with a corkscrew, she refuses. That is how she saw it in her head, and that it is how it must remain.
Theo’s partner thinks he is barmy for publishing the book, and the book becomes a smashing success. As many writers will attest, it goes to show what publishers or editors know about readers. How many publishers passed on Harry Potter? The list is not short.
Edward Gibbon may have written The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but Elizabeth Taylor wrote The Rise and Fall of Angelica Deverell. At the height of her success, Angel receives a visit from Nora Howe-Nevinson, an amateur poet, who is a huge fan of her books. As important as Nora is going to prove to be to Angel, she has only eyes for Nora’s brother Esme. He is the perfect wastrel for a rich woman to fall in love with.
”He had so often taken the initiative in life, without the reserves to back up his actions; he was always withdrawing from absurd forays he should never have set out on. The emotions he had inspired in other people were not peaceful ones, adoration turned into contempt, desire to jealous anger. His life had been hindered by his beauty and the adventures it had permitted him.”
He is a painter by trade, maybe even a good one, but to be good and be known takes lots of effort and more than a bit of luck, and Esme is blessed with neither of those qualities in sizeable amounts.
He does see the majestic qualities about Angel that few can really see.
”The blue-black hair lay against her cream-coloured arms; the skin under her armpits was a deeper colour, of a shade near apricot. With his eyes half-closed he tried to set limits to the picture he saw, as if he were going to paint her as she sat upright among the tumbled bedclothes and the crumpled pillows. The raven hair was a wonderful contrast to the gradations of white through cream to warm yellow. He studied the textures of the linen with its grey shadows and her skin with its golden lights. He sat and considered her, trying to see her afresh, wondering what she was like, as he had often wondered when they were first acquainted.”
Now that is a painting I would buy, but Esme never paints it. He fritters away his days doing anything but lifting a paint brush. Angel is hard to like. Compliments from her are few and far between. She is emotionally stunted, and keeps everyone a pole length away. She is rude, too honest, and difficult to please. When a person builds glittering sand castles in her mind, the real world is a very dull and dreary place. For all of her issues, I can’t help marveling at her dedication to writing and her devotion to the worlds she creates.
There are epic female characters in literature like Miss Havisham, Jane Eyre, Scarlett O’Hara, Lisbeth Salander, and Mrs. Danvers. Angel shares characteristics of all these women, and certainly she will join my list of greatest female literary creations who will always inspire me with their greatness and their human frailties.
Oh yes, more Elizabeth Taylor please.
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
September 13, 2025
Elizabeth Taylor has created such an unlikeable but memorable character in Angel Deverell! She is a total narcissist. No social finesse. No filters when she speaks. Yet, I felt sorry for her and I have to say, I admired her determination.
We meet her when she is 15 yrs old. She can’t stand her life and just wants to escape it. Escape she does when she starts writing her novel. By age 17, she is on the road to success. We follow her through her life.
Hilary Mantel wrote the forward to this book. She says, “Angel is a book in which an accomplished, deft,and somewhat underrated writer has a great deal of fun at the expense of a crass, graceless and wildly overpaid one. Taylor is a writer of impeccable taste, while Angelica Deverell is a high priestess of schlock.” Apparently, Angel is inspired by real life writer Marie Corelli. Thanks Mela, for that information:)
A description of Angel that I really loved: “Once he saw a large cactus plant in a flower shop window. From one unpromising, barbed shoot had sprung a huge, glowering bloom. It looked solitary and incongruous, a freakish accident; and he was reminded of Angel.
I loved this revelation about her writing: “ I think that the secret of your power over people is that you communicate with yourself, not with your readers.”
This is such a brilliant book. Elizabeth Taylor has created a character that I will never forget. Be warned though, if you are someone who has to connect or love the main character, don’t read this book. If you want to meet Angel, with all her flaws , then you must read this book.
Update: 12 Sept 2025- Reread this book for an upcoming course. Still a 5 star read. It was just as perfect the second time around. Elizabeth Taylor is such an amazing writer!
Published: 1957
We meet her when she is 15 yrs old. She can’t stand her life and just wants to escape it. Escape she does when she starts writing her novel. By age 17, she is on the road to success. We follow her through her life.
Hilary Mantel wrote the forward to this book. She says, “Angel is a book in which an accomplished, deft,and somewhat underrated writer has a great deal of fun at the expense of a crass, graceless and wildly overpaid one. Taylor is a writer of impeccable taste, while Angelica Deverell is a high priestess of schlock.” Apparently, Angel is inspired by real life writer Marie Corelli. Thanks Mela, for that information:)
A description of Angel that I really loved: “Once he saw a large cactus plant in a flower shop window. From one unpromising, barbed shoot had sprung a huge, glowering bloom. It looked solitary and incongruous, a freakish accident; and he was reminded of Angel.
I loved this revelation about her writing: “ I think that the secret of your power over people is that you communicate with yourself, not with your readers.”
This is such a brilliant book. Elizabeth Taylor has created a character that I will never forget. Be warned though, if you are someone who has to connect or love the main character, don’t read this book. If you want to meet Angel, with all her flaws , then you must read this book.
Update: 12 Sept 2025- Reread this book for an upcoming course. Still a 5 star read. It was just as perfect the second time around. Elizabeth Taylor is such an amazing writer!
Published: 1957
April 17, 2023
Friendless, and unhappy at home, the eponymous Angel of this book goes to her room, refusing to ever go to school again, ever to leave her home again, until she writes her first novel. And she does. At 16. It is the product of a life un-lived, a delusional mind in progress. There are long words, not all used correctly. There are factual mistakes -- like opening champagne with a corkscrew. Roman and Greek deities get mixed. Prepositions end sentences. But there is romance. She finds a publisher who wishes a few alterations. Absolutely not, Angel says. And of course she becomes wildly popular.
Let me interrupt my narrative to mention that Elizabeth Taylor is a writer's writer, and is being championed in particular by notable female authors. Valerie Martin, Sarah Waters and Elizabeth Bowen gush on the back cover of the edition I read. And Hilary Mantel writes a brilliant Introduction, concluding with this interpretation:
One could argue that the author is showing us Angel as an awful warning; that she is telling us "this is how bad art is made." But I don't think the book is as simple as that. It seems to me that what Elizabeth Taylor does is to de-romanticize the process of writing and show it to us close up, so that we are aware of that if ten per-cent of the process is exhilaration, the rest is tedium, backache and the fear of failure; that, whatever the impulse to art, however little or great the gift, a cast-iron vanity and a will to power are needed to sustain it. Writers are monsters, she is telling us; how else would you be reading this book? (emphasis added)
Well, let me tell you, it is quite an honor indeed to have a two-time Booker Prize-winning author, perhaps unsure of herself, ask me, Yantush Passingass, what I thought. Oh, I didn't realize Mantel was speaking to me directly and singly (she was) until I was about halfway through this novel. When I had an epiphany. For that we need to go back to the narrative.
Angel becomes rich and famous but she doesn't change. She is rude and arrogant, delusional. At a party hosted by her publisher she meets Lord Nobley and his niece Nora and nephew Esmé. Within an hour she has fallen for Esmé.
How many Esmés do you know? I don't know any, not in real life.
Then there it was, midway through the book, Taylor imagining Angel's thoughts: She had to become a different person before she could endure it, and she was not always able, even for the love of Esmé, to make the change. (emphasis added).
Could it be? It was almost fifty years since I'd read J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories which included "For Esme-With Love and Squalor". All I could remember was the wonderful title. But surely it was not mere coincidence. So I found the little Bantam paperback on a dusty shelf. (Where did I ever come up with the 75 cents?)
Do you remember it?
Sergeant X, in American intelligence, stops in an English church to wait out the rain. A choir of children is singing. He notices one young girl in particular. Later, having tea, that same young girl walks up to his table. She is bold, and almost precocious, meaning she uses big words which she almost understands. "I'm going to be a professional singer. ... I'm going to sing jazz on the radio and make heaps of money. Then, when I'm thirty, I shall retire and live on a ranch in Ohio. ... Do you know Ohio?" She tells X that "You seem quite intelligent for an American." It is a remarkable conversation. Near its end, Esmé says, "I'd be extremely flattered if you'd write a story exclusively for me sometime. I'm an avid reader. ... It doesn't have to be terribly prolific! Just so it isn't childish and silly. ... I prefer stories about squalor."
The imagined life. You know what I mean, avid readers. To be a child again, when you think you might accomplish something so great they'll put your face on a stamp. The voice was the same, Taylor's Angel or Salinger's Esmé.
Angel spends her money, on marmosets and peacocks, paintings by the pricetag, all to adorn Paradise House, which gradually submits to the prodigious burden of its decay. In case you think I've gone mad myself, at best a debatable point I'd say, Taylor actually calls it cozy squalor.
So, - (may I call you 'Hilary'?) - since you asked, this is what I think. Salinger published 'For Esmé - With Love and Squalor' in 1950, and collected it in Nine Stories in 1953. Elizabeth Taylor read it. I think she was moved by the story, of war and what happens after war; and I think she was delighted with the character of the young girl, who would end her conversation with Sergeant X by saying, Il faut que je parte aussi.
There are good writers and bad writers. And readers, too. The people who are right are those that buy it. But at some core writers tell stories, don't they, Hilary? Angel told stories, all made up, to some younger girls, who asked her: Will you tell us some more tomorrow? Isn't that better than the prizes?
Debate what you will about the hidden meanings of this novel. Smile wryly at the humor. See allegory if you must. Marvel at the marvelous character of Angel's chauffeur, aptly named 'Marvell'.
Me? Since you asked, Hilary: I think Taylor loved a little girl, a little girl who was not quite right, but one who asked an author the exactly right question. I think Taylor wrote this -- for Esmé, with love and squalor.
Let me interrupt my narrative to mention that Elizabeth Taylor is a writer's writer, and is being championed in particular by notable female authors. Valerie Martin, Sarah Waters and Elizabeth Bowen gush on the back cover of the edition I read. And Hilary Mantel writes a brilliant Introduction, concluding with this interpretation:
One could argue that the author is showing us Angel as an awful warning; that she is telling us "this is how bad art is made." But I don't think the book is as simple as that. It seems to me that what Elizabeth Taylor does is to de-romanticize the process of writing and show it to us close up, so that we are aware of that if ten per-cent of the process is exhilaration, the rest is tedium, backache and the fear of failure; that, whatever the impulse to art, however little or great the gift, a cast-iron vanity and a will to power are needed to sustain it. Writers are monsters, she is telling us; how else would you be reading this book? (emphasis added)
Well, let me tell you, it is quite an honor indeed to have a two-time Booker Prize-winning author, perhaps unsure of herself, ask me, Yantush Passingass, what I thought. Oh, I didn't realize Mantel was speaking to me directly and singly (she was) until I was about halfway through this novel. When I had an epiphany. For that we need to go back to the narrative.
Angel becomes rich and famous but she doesn't change. She is rude and arrogant, delusional. At a party hosted by her publisher she meets Lord Nobley and his niece Nora and nephew Esmé. Within an hour she has fallen for Esmé.
How many Esmés do you know? I don't know any, not in real life.
Then there it was, midway through the book, Taylor imagining Angel's thoughts: She had to become a different person before she could endure it, and she was not always able, even for the love of Esmé, to make the change. (emphasis added).
Could it be? It was almost fifty years since I'd read J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories which included "For Esme-With Love and Squalor". All I could remember was the wonderful title. But surely it was not mere coincidence. So I found the little Bantam paperback on a dusty shelf. (Where did I ever come up with the 75 cents?)
Do you remember it?
Sergeant X, in American intelligence, stops in an English church to wait out the rain. A choir of children is singing. He notices one young girl in particular. Later, having tea, that same young girl walks up to his table. She is bold, and almost precocious, meaning she uses big words which she almost understands. "I'm going to be a professional singer. ... I'm going to sing jazz on the radio and make heaps of money. Then, when I'm thirty, I shall retire and live on a ranch in Ohio. ... Do you know Ohio?" She tells X that "You seem quite intelligent for an American." It is a remarkable conversation. Near its end, Esmé says, "I'd be extremely flattered if you'd write a story exclusively for me sometime. I'm an avid reader. ... It doesn't have to be terribly prolific! Just so it isn't childish and silly. ... I prefer stories about squalor."
The imagined life. You know what I mean, avid readers. To be a child again, when you think you might accomplish something so great they'll put your face on a stamp. The voice was the same, Taylor's Angel or Salinger's Esmé.
Angel spends her money, on marmosets and peacocks, paintings by the pricetag, all to adorn Paradise House, which gradually submits to the prodigious burden of its decay. In case you think I've gone mad myself, at best a debatable point I'd say, Taylor actually calls it cozy squalor.
So, - (may I call you 'Hilary'?) - since you asked, this is what I think. Salinger published 'For Esmé - With Love and Squalor' in 1950, and collected it in Nine Stories in 1953. Elizabeth Taylor read it. I think she was moved by the story, of war and what happens after war; and I think she was delighted with the character of the young girl, who would end her conversation with Sergeant X by saying, Il faut que je parte aussi.
There are good writers and bad writers. And readers, too. The people who are right are those that buy it. But at some core writers tell stories, don't they, Hilary? Angel told stories, all made up, to some younger girls, who asked her: Will you tell us some more tomorrow? Isn't that better than the prizes?
Debate what you will about the hidden meanings of this novel. Smile wryly at the humor. See allegory if you must. Marvel at the marvelous character of Angel's chauffeur, aptly named 'Marvell'.
Me? Since you asked, Hilary: I think Taylor loved a little girl, a little girl who was not quite right, but one who asked an author the exactly right question. I think Taylor wrote this -- for Esmé, with love and squalor.
August 5, 2025
No es mi tipo este ángel, aunque reconozco que puede ser del agrado de otros paladares pues es una buena novela. Está escrita con elegancia y es muy capaz de provocar la sonrisa en más de una ocasión gracias a la ironía con la que trata al personaje principal, evitando siempre el sarcasmo que en realidad merece, y del que incluso a puntito estamos de compadecernos... a puntito, recalco.
Lo que no he encontrado por ninguna parte es el parecido con Jane Austen que algunos apuntan, más allá de que la protagonista pudiera recordar por su carácter arrogante y atrabiliario a alguno de esos personajes femeninos secundarios tan irritantes de la escritora clásica.
October 11, 2024
I found this an odd book with an odd protagonist, though its oddness is not what left me unsure of what it all 'meant'. I don't usually go looking for meaning, but I thought maybe I should and then I glanced at the ratings of my GR friends who've read this and wondered why my reaction was different from theirs.
Angel's main, unchanging trait is her unrealistic view of the real world. From the first time we see her, she is living in her head. Because it is the Edwardian age, I suppose, she is shunned by her community, and even her mother, who feels a deep shame when one of Angel's stories (falsehoods) comes to light. This downfall precipitates her rise. Her wants, at first, are few; but they are big, and the novel details how she achieves them and what happens afterward. Those who take care of her (her publisher, her companion, an old servant) take care to keep her sheltered within her unreal world as it is what fuels her florid fiction (as well as its accompanying alliteration). At least that is the cynical view, as her enablers are all good people.
Though Angel couldn't be more different from her creator as to the fiction she produces, Angel's process would be the process of just about any writer, I would think. So I wonder if that's what this book means: that no matter what one writes, or creates (there's a painter in this book too), for it to 'become' something in the world, even if it's what some of us might term "poorly written trash", the writer has to have been immersed in her own imaginative world to the detriment of the so-called real world.
There's an important character in this book named Esmé, and because I'm an American, I knew this name first from reading Salinger, yet Salinger's character is female, though I see from the internet it was originally a masculine name (of course it was) and means 'loved', so that fits. A later minor character in this novel uses the word feminine in reference to this Esmé, so there's that too. And then I came across the word squalor and thought: huh, surely that's not a coincidence but an homage. And then, and then! after writing this review and then rereading Tony's review, which I'd totally forgotten, thinking I'd discovered this volume first out of all my GR friends (yeah, right, such is the sign of an aging memory), I see he'd figured it all out already: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
I also find that by this odd process of writing (though mine here is not an imaginative one as Taylor writes of) I've gotten more out of this odd novel than I originally thought.
Angel's main, unchanging trait is her unrealistic view of the real world. From the first time we see her, she is living in her head. Because it is the Edwardian age, I suppose, she is shunned by her community, and even her mother, who feels a deep shame when one of Angel's stories (falsehoods) comes to light. This downfall precipitates her rise. Her wants, at first, are few; but they are big, and the novel details how she achieves them and what happens afterward. Those who take care of her (her publisher, her companion, an old servant) take care to keep her sheltered within her unreal world as it is what fuels her florid fiction (as well as its accompanying alliteration). At least that is the cynical view, as her enablers are all good people.
Though Angel couldn't be more different from her creator as to the fiction she produces, Angel's process would be the process of just about any writer, I would think. So I wonder if that's what this book means: that no matter what one writes, or creates (there's a painter in this book too), for it to 'become' something in the world, even if it's what some of us might term "poorly written trash", the writer has to have been immersed in her own imaginative world to the detriment of the so-called real world.
There's an important character in this book named Esmé, and because I'm an American, I knew this name first from reading Salinger, yet Salinger's character is female, though I see from the internet it was originally a masculine name (of course it was) and means 'loved', so that fits. A later minor character in this novel uses the word feminine in reference to this Esmé, so there's that too. And then I came across the word squalor and thought: huh, surely that's not a coincidence but an homage. And then, and then! after writing this review and then rereading Tony's review, which I'd totally forgotten, thinking I'd discovered this volume first out of all my GR friends (yeah, right, such is the sign of an aging memory), I see he'd figured it all out already: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
I also find that by this odd process of writing (though mine here is not an imaginative one as Taylor writes of) I've gotten more out of this odd novel than I originally thought.
May 11, 2012
In my feeble attempt to raise the dismal 11% of books read by authors of the fairer sex to a more politically sensitive number this is the fourth book in a row I've read by a woman. I hadn't heard of Elizabeth Taylor (the novelist) until just a couple of months ago when New York Review of Books re-issued two of her novels, this one and another one. Because NYRB make their books look so pleasing I was immediately interested in checking her out. On some recent AIFAF I came across a copy of Angel in a previous edition, that is also aesthetically nice, so I purchased it and now I read it.
I don't know much about Elizabeth Taylor (novelist). She's sort of a mid-century British novelist. This novel is 'nice', in a very genteel way. I mean that in a positive way. It's the kind of novel that you think of as a well-written novel, there is nothing that is really flashy going on, but it's quite enjoyable.
The basis of the novel is following the life of author who writes an absurdly comical romance novel at the age of fifteen, and becomes a best-selling author writing more absurdly comical novels that Edwardian England gobbles up, the lower classes relishing in the ornate descriptions and risque situations of the the rich and powerful, and the more intelligent readers enjoying the absurdities and high-flautin verbosity the ambling authoress ascribes to pages with no regard, or perhaps one would dare to utter in a snickering breath while salaciously slandering the successful scribe at a salon with having an elementary lack of any depth or wit of understanding about the tropes and topics she has taken to put to typeset in her tomes. Angel, the main character in the story, is a humorless sort, who writes novels about the way she thinks the world is, her first being the way she sees Lords and Ladies living in opulent homes, while she lives in a slum. She sees her first novel and subsequent ones as being gravely serious, and is so pig-headed that she won't hear that the world isn't the way she thinks it is.
This is the story of a delusional tyrant. It's quite fun.
If Angel were alive today she would probably be self-publishing barely edited novels and populating message boards complaining about the possibility that someone was going to illegally download her novel, steal a pittance of royalties in between trolling review sites like goodreads to attack reviewers who point out how awful her books are. Or she would be one of those wunder-authors that come out of nowhere and sell a bazillion copies even though their stuff is barely readable dreck. Forgive me, but I kept thinking EL James while reading this, although I have no idea if EL James is a delusional tyrant, or writing novels filled with gross inaccuracies and nonsense. But both owe their financial success to titillating 'the common folk'.
I'm curious to read some more of Elizabeth Taylor (novelist). She sort of reminded me of Dawn Powell, but maybe it was just because they are both roughly writing in the same time (I think, I could be wrong about this, but who needs facts), about artist / author types and with a very crisp clean no-flash style that is a pleasure to read.
I have one more lady author book to finish up before giving all my attention to a guy author who has written what is being called possibly the best book written in the past ten years and by blurbs is promising to be DFW, Gaddis and Pynchon wrapped up with The Wire, and with praise like that I've just got to see if it lives up to the hype. But from my brief foray into books by women (not that I've never read books my women before, I just don't usually think about the gender of the author when I choose books, and apparently that means that almost ninety percent of the time I'm going to pick a book by a guy) I'm starting to think that women are fairly brutal in their representation of female characters. I'm probably just extrapolating but with this book and the Muriel Sparks book I read (and even Dare Me to some degree), there's not so much go-girl! enthusiasm as here is a fairly close look at some women, warts and all and it's not going to be pretty. Not that I was expecting to have picked books that celebrate sisterhood and have women in pants traveling around saying Ya-Ya to each other, or whatever it is that certain books that look like their covers were designed by the same ad agency responsible for douche commercials have in them. I don't know what I'm actually saying, but I did manage to use the word douche in a review without referring to another reviewer or anyone else in a derogatory manner. Yay me!
I don't know much about Elizabeth Taylor (novelist). She's sort of a mid-century British novelist. This novel is 'nice', in a very genteel way. I mean that in a positive way. It's the kind of novel that you think of as a well-written novel, there is nothing that is really flashy going on, but it's quite enjoyable.
The basis of the novel is following the life of author who writes an absurdly comical romance novel at the age of fifteen, and becomes a best-selling author writing more absurdly comical novels that Edwardian England gobbles up, the lower classes relishing in the ornate descriptions and risque situations of the the rich and powerful, and the more intelligent readers enjoying the absurdities and high-flautin verbosity the ambling authoress ascribes to pages with no regard, or perhaps one would dare to utter in a snickering breath while salaciously slandering the successful scribe at a salon with having an elementary lack of any depth or wit of understanding about the tropes and topics she has taken to put to typeset in her tomes. Angel, the main character in the story, is a humorless sort, who writes novels about the way she thinks the world is, her first being the way she sees Lords and Ladies living in opulent homes, while she lives in a slum. She sees her first novel and subsequent ones as being gravely serious, and is so pig-headed that she won't hear that the world isn't the way she thinks it is.
This is the story of a delusional tyrant. It's quite fun.
If Angel were alive today she would probably be self-publishing barely edited novels and populating message boards complaining about the possibility that someone was going to illegally download her novel, steal a pittance of royalties in between trolling review sites like goodreads to attack reviewers who point out how awful her books are. Or she would be one of those wunder-authors that come out of nowhere and sell a bazillion copies even though their stuff is barely readable dreck. Forgive me, but I kept thinking EL James while reading this, although I have no idea if EL James is a delusional tyrant, or writing novels filled with gross inaccuracies and nonsense. But both owe their financial success to titillating 'the common folk'.
I'm curious to read some more of Elizabeth Taylor (novelist). She sort of reminded me of Dawn Powell, but maybe it was just because they are both roughly writing in the same time (I think, I could be wrong about this, but who needs facts), about artist / author types and with a very crisp clean no-flash style that is a pleasure to read.
I have one more lady author book to finish up before giving all my attention to a guy author who has written what is being called possibly the best book written in the past ten years and by blurbs is promising to be DFW, Gaddis and Pynchon wrapped up with The Wire, and with praise like that I've just got to see if it lives up to the hype. But from my brief foray into books by women (not that I've never read books my women before, I just don't usually think about the gender of the author when I choose books, and apparently that means that almost ninety percent of the time I'm going to pick a book by a guy) I'm starting to think that women are fairly brutal in their representation of female characters. I'm probably just extrapolating but with this book and the Muriel Sparks book I read (and even Dare Me to some degree), there's not so much go-girl! enthusiasm as here is a fairly close look at some women, warts and all and it's not going to be pretty. Not that I was expecting to have picked books that celebrate sisterhood and have women in pants traveling around saying Ya-Ya to each other, or whatever it is that certain books that look like their covers were designed by the same ad agency responsible for douche commercials have in them. I don't know what I'm actually saying, but I did manage to use the word douche in a review without referring to another reviewer or anyone else in a derogatory manner. Yay me!
July 27, 2025
This is a wonderful, icily-comic novel. Set in England from 1900 through the late 1940s, it’s the story of a cruel and incurious girl novelist who grows up to become a cruel and incurious lady novelist.
When we first meet Angel Deverell she’s 16, living in a dreary English backwater, her mother running a shop downstairs, whereupon she discovers her gift for writing novels — very bad novels — very quickly.
Yet these ignorant, terrible books appeal to a huge part of the English population and she becomes quite rich.
She is the most disagreeable monster: uncaring and lacking in sympathy; she drives her mother to an early grave. She has no compassion for others, only self-centeredness.
Ah, then comes the comeuppance: She falls in love with a rake who has shamed his family and scandalized England. It is this loathsome man — Esmé — she has stubbornly decided to love. This from their honeymoon:
“She did not notice that he was growing sulky, like a spoilt child. [Her] . . . gifts were all so inevitable, and the signs of his gratitude so eagerly looked for. She had a sad way of damaging his enthusiasms, in the way that she had damaged Greece, with her scorn. Jealousy was at the root of her cynicism. He was not to admire anything or anyone but her; not even a fragment of sculpture.” (p. 155)
The problem she had with Greece was that it looked nothing like the pseudo-Greece of her novels. Naturally, the real Greece should resemble her imagined Greece.
And . . .
“In October, he said that he was joining up [to fight in World War I]. He made this announcement to Angel curtly and shamefacedly, as if he were saying instead that he was leaving her for another woman. She became so hysterical that this might have been the case, reviling him for deserting her, accusing him of moral cowardice and bloodthirstiness; she pleaded with him, her face distorted with weeping; she threatened him that . . . he would find Paradise House locked against him when he returned. When, for the first time, she saw him in uniform she felt shock and estrangement.“ (p. 162)
She persists in her intransigence, living in her head, where everything is ducky. Her death is the result of lifelong denial and impenetrable vanity. In the end, it is the grief and selfless love for Angel of her sister-in-law companion, Nora, that moves us intolerably.
When we first meet Angel Deverell she’s 16, living in a dreary English backwater, her mother running a shop downstairs, whereupon she discovers her gift for writing novels — very bad novels — very quickly.
Yet these ignorant, terrible books appeal to a huge part of the English population and she becomes quite rich.
She is the most disagreeable monster: uncaring and lacking in sympathy; she drives her mother to an early grave. She has no compassion for others, only self-centeredness.
Ah, then comes the comeuppance: She falls in love with a rake who has shamed his family and scandalized England. It is this loathsome man — Esmé — she has stubbornly decided to love. This from their honeymoon:
“She did not notice that he was growing sulky, like a spoilt child. [Her] . . . gifts were all so inevitable, and the signs of his gratitude so eagerly looked for. She had a sad way of damaging his enthusiasms, in the way that she had damaged Greece, with her scorn. Jealousy was at the root of her cynicism. He was not to admire anything or anyone but her; not even a fragment of sculpture.” (p. 155)
The problem she had with Greece was that it looked nothing like the pseudo-Greece of her novels. Naturally, the real Greece should resemble her imagined Greece.
And . . .
“In October, he said that he was joining up [to fight in World War I]. He made this announcement to Angel curtly and shamefacedly, as if he were saying instead that he was leaving her for another woman. She became so hysterical that this might have been the case, reviling him for deserting her, accusing him of moral cowardice and bloodthirstiness; she pleaded with him, her face distorted with weeping; she threatened him that . . . he would find Paradise House locked against him when he returned. When, for the first time, she saw him in uniform she felt shock and estrangement.“ (p. 162)
She persists in her intransigence, living in her head, where everything is ducky. Her death is the result of lifelong denial and impenetrable vanity. In the end, it is the grief and selfless love for Angel of her sister-in-law companion, Nora, that moves us intolerably.
March 10, 2019
4.5 stars
This is one of Taylor’s better known novels and one of her least typical. It tells the story of a life from adolescence to old age and death. Angelica (Angel) Deverell is a writer, one of the greatest she believes and is also completely lacking in self-awareness. Taylor is parodying a certain type of late Victorian or Edwardian romantic author (Marie Corelli or Ouida). Her work is overblown and sensational and the critics hate it: however for a time the public loves it.
We get a sense of what Angel is writing at the start of the novel when one of her teachers questions her prose: “into the vast vacuity of the empyrean” asking what it means:
“It means,” Angel said. Her tongue moistened her lips. She glanced out of the classroom window at the sky beyond the bare trees. “It means ’the highest heavens’.”
“Yes, the sky,” Miss Dawson said suspiciously”
The vividness and flamboyance of the prose persists into adult life and into her many novels. She is taken on by a publisher who expect little and are surprised by her popularity. The following exchange with Theo, the member of the publishing house tasked with looking after Angel illustrates the sort of writer Taylor is parodying:
“‘Then you are a great reader, perhaps?’
‘No, I don’t read much. I haven’t got any books, and nowadays I am always writing.’
‘But even so, most authors take some interest in the works of others. Is there no public library you could join?’
A little colour came to her cheeks and she said, ‘I don’t think I should want to.’”
The reader does feel sorry for Theo who is very patient and very put upon:
“He sometimes longed, too, to take a rest from the hazards of her correspondence. Two or three times a week, her letters, carelessly scrawled in violet ink, arrived at the office with her complaints about the insufficiency of his advertising, his lack of chivalry in not challenging her critics, the shortcomings of Mudie’s, the negligence of compositors. She accused him of cheese-paring; her advances, she said, were so niggardly as to be insulting. She mentioned great sums which had been paid by other publishers to other women novelists – to Miss Corelli and Miss Broughton – and suggested that from the fortune her books had provided him he was subsidising the bungled efforts of the other women writers on his list. “As it is by my industry that these poor little books are published at all,” she wrote, “it would merely be civil of you to acquaint me with your future plans for spreading this charity about.”
Angel is thoughtless of the feeling of others, she doesn’t seem to actually notice them. She does marry and her husband and his sister live with her. Esme, her husband, is an artist and a bit of a waste of space and spends most of his time sponging off her. We go through almost the first half of the twentieth century.
Angel has an idyll in mind. Local to her as a schoolgirl is Paradise House, the big house where her aunt is in service. Angel has plans for it:
“..she dreamed through the lonely evenings, closing her eyes to create the darkness where Paradise House could take shape, embellished and enlarged day after day — with colonnades and cupolas, archways and flights of steps…. Acquisitively, from photographs and drawings in history books, she added one detail after another. That will do for Paradise House, was an obsessive formula which became a daily habit. The white peacocks would do;… as would the cedar trees at school”
As a successful novelist she is able to purchase Paradise House and live in it. What Taylor does very well is to describe the gradual decline of Paradise House and of Angel herself. Taylor is also making a perceptive comment about the status of women whose life choices were limited:
“At other times she was menaced by intimations of the truth. Her heart would be alarmed, as if by a sudden roll of drums, and she would spring to her feet, beset by the reality of the room, her own face — not beautiful, she saw — in the looking-glass and the commonplace sounds in the shop below. She would know then that she was in her own setting and had no reason for ever finding herself elsewhere; know moreover that she was bereft of the power to rescue herself, the brains or the beauty by which other young women made their escape. Her panic-striken face would be reflected back at her as she struggled to deny her identity, slowly cosseting herself away from the truth. She was learning to triumph over reality, and the truth was beginning to leave her in peace.”
Angel’s escape was of her own making, a delusion created and maintained and the mask rarely slips. It’s a tour de force and whilst Angel is a monstrous character one cannot help feeling sorry for her and those around her.
This is one of Taylor’s better known novels and one of her least typical. It tells the story of a life from adolescence to old age and death. Angelica (Angel) Deverell is a writer, one of the greatest she believes and is also completely lacking in self-awareness. Taylor is parodying a certain type of late Victorian or Edwardian romantic author (Marie Corelli or Ouida). Her work is overblown and sensational and the critics hate it: however for a time the public loves it.
We get a sense of what Angel is writing at the start of the novel when one of her teachers questions her prose: “into the vast vacuity of the empyrean” asking what it means:
“It means,” Angel said. Her tongue moistened her lips. She glanced out of the classroom window at the sky beyond the bare trees. “It means ’the highest heavens’.”
“Yes, the sky,” Miss Dawson said suspiciously”
The vividness and flamboyance of the prose persists into adult life and into her many novels. She is taken on by a publisher who expect little and are surprised by her popularity. The following exchange with Theo, the member of the publishing house tasked with looking after Angel illustrates the sort of writer Taylor is parodying:
“‘Then you are a great reader, perhaps?’
‘No, I don’t read much. I haven’t got any books, and nowadays I am always writing.’
‘But even so, most authors take some interest in the works of others. Is there no public library you could join?’
A little colour came to her cheeks and she said, ‘I don’t think I should want to.’”
The reader does feel sorry for Theo who is very patient and very put upon:
“He sometimes longed, too, to take a rest from the hazards of her correspondence. Two or three times a week, her letters, carelessly scrawled in violet ink, arrived at the office with her complaints about the insufficiency of his advertising, his lack of chivalry in not challenging her critics, the shortcomings of Mudie’s, the negligence of compositors. She accused him of cheese-paring; her advances, she said, were so niggardly as to be insulting. She mentioned great sums which had been paid by other publishers to other women novelists – to Miss Corelli and Miss Broughton – and suggested that from the fortune her books had provided him he was subsidising the bungled efforts of the other women writers on his list. “As it is by my industry that these poor little books are published at all,” she wrote, “it would merely be civil of you to acquaint me with your future plans for spreading this charity about.”
Angel is thoughtless of the feeling of others, she doesn’t seem to actually notice them. She does marry and her husband and his sister live with her. Esme, her husband, is an artist and a bit of a waste of space and spends most of his time sponging off her. We go through almost the first half of the twentieth century.
Angel has an idyll in mind. Local to her as a schoolgirl is Paradise House, the big house where her aunt is in service. Angel has plans for it:
“..she dreamed through the lonely evenings, closing her eyes to create the darkness where Paradise House could take shape, embellished and enlarged day after day — with colonnades and cupolas, archways and flights of steps…. Acquisitively, from photographs and drawings in history books, she added one detail after another. That will do for Paradise House, was an obsessive formula which became a daily habit. The white peacocks would do;… as would the cedar trees at school”
As a successful novelist she is able to purchase Paradise House and live in it. What Taylor does very well is to describe the gradual decline of Paradise House and of Angel herself. Taylor is also making a perceptive comment about the status of women whose life choices were limited:
“At other times she was menaced by intimations of the truth. Her heart would be alarmed, as if by a sudden roll of drums, and she would spring to her feet, beset by the reality of the room, her own face — not beautiful, she saw — in the looking-glass and the commonplace sounds in the shop below. She would know then that she was in her own setting and had no reason for ever finding herself elsewhere; know moreover that she was bereft of the power to rescue herself, the brains or the beauty by which other young women made their escape. Her panic-striken face would be reflected back at her as she struggled to deny her identity, slowly cosseting herself away from the truth. She was learning to triumph over reality, and the truth was beginning to leave her in peace.”
Angel’s escape was of her own making, a delusion created and maintained and the mask rarely slips. It’s a tour de force and whilst Angel is a monstrous character one cannot help feeling sorry for her and those around her.
April 21, 2023
This is a strange book from Taylor - it's set in the Edwardian era, with Angel publishing her first novel at the age of 16 - the year that Queen Victoria dies, 1901. We're specifically told this - "the year Victoria died." If you know Taylor, then you know this is important. It was really unusual in 1901 for any woman to have a career, let alone a 16 year-old girl. Angel is possibly one of the most fascinating heroines that Taylor has created - from all twelve of her novels. This one was published in 1957, (I have the lovely Virago edition re-published in 1984) so - this is novel number 6 sandwiched between The Sleeping Beauty (1953), and A Game of Hide and Seek (1958), both of which I have read recently. There are connections between Taylor's novels, and I can see how Angel could be a continuation - psychologically of what happens in The Sleeping Beauty (nothing to do with plot, but the author's interests and themes) and Angel does connect thematically with A Game of Hide and Seek also - lots of connections in fact between all three.
In Angel - our main character spends her whole life, wanting to love and be loved; in its absence, she devotes her energies, time and skills to her career. Angel writes Mills & Boon type romances and she is, to a certain point, extremely successful, and this, in spite of the critics calling her books, trashy nonsense, pot-boilers, and worse. I could see, however, that maybe Taylor thought this was her present and possible future life also - a woman compensating herself with a career after trying the alternative one of marriage, housewife and children. Taylor was known for living a quiet life, devoting herself to her husband and her two children and writing her - incredible novels - in between. Our reading group, however, has discovered that Elizabeth Taylor had a secret love; an "on-again-off-again relationship" - I quote because the information came from Daniel - who is in our group. Steamy pot-boiler herself!
I don't normally want to know about the private lives of authors. I did that - big mistake, with Muriel Spark, who reminds me quite of lot of Taylor. They both have a talent for using themselves to re-create the characters in their novels.
And so it is with Taylor - she is a writer who is exclusively concerned with psychological reality - for sure she used her own experiences in all of those wonderful love moments. I can think of Tory (Victoria) in A View of the Harbour (1947) - those entanglements with her best friend's husband are so intensely real. Or Emily with Vinny A Game of Hide and Seek sitting on the rocks, in their secret little valley close to the shore - intense realism in how the couple's passion ignites, or Kate Heron with Charles - In a Summer Season (1961) - who sits with her on a picnic rug and asks - 'Are you really happy with Dermot?' And in Angel - those insights into the couple's sex-life:
Like many romantic narcissistic women she shied away from the final act of love-making. She would have lived in a world of courtship and hand-kissing if she could. Sex seemed to have nothing to do with her. It was a sudden reversal, not a continuation, of the delights of being wooed. She had to become a different person before she could endure it, and she was not always able, even for Esmé, to make the change. That desperate communication with herself in which she writes, holds good in love as well, he thought.
Smart guy that Esmé, needless to say he has married Angel - for her money.
Is that also Taylor when she re-creates the scenes between Theo Gilbright (Angel's publisher) and his wife Hermoine:
"HER life is one I shouldn't care to live," said Hermoine, when she and Theo were alone. "Did you notice the photograph of Angel garbed as one of the muses, sitting on a marble seat in a trance, with her mother standing up behind her at a respectful distance? It was among the conglomeration of stuff on the piano. . . .
Dinner will be dreadful, and only the first of three. Now if I put on the amber satin I shall clash furiously with her. Or was that a tea-gown she was wearing? I have read of tea-gowns. Oh dear and there are no canaries for me to feed if things get bad. I shall have to take refuge with that evil-looking parrot. (Theo listens in silence) . . .
Are you thinking that I all I say is in execrable taste? Because that is what you look as if you are thinking? ARE? you thinking that?"
(Theo says he thought Angel looked vulnerable - Theo is such a kind guy!)
"Forbearance! You are a spiteful little chatterbox." He put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her as she sat at the dressing-table. "If you go through this with flying-colours - but not so flying as to invite suspicion - I will buy you a nice present, a souvenir. I AM grateful, for I know you will really try in spite of all you say. And you aren't REALLY grey, you know, I can still see a lot of brown hairs."
She began to shake with laughter, and love for him brought sudden tears to her eyes, and she turned aside to hide them.
I loved that scene - a happy marriage between Theo and Hermione, but with its ups and downs as in REAL life.
I first encountered this novel, a good 12 or 15 years before, and put it down at the half-way point - I really disliked Angel; her ludicrous behaviours, her intensely solipsistic, and domineering nature and yes her cruelty to her mother. But I didn't know Taylor then, now I do. This time I read to the end - and the ending!! The last two sections! I think Parts 5 and 6 are the most wonderful parts of the book. Taylor is so clever, she gives us this awful heroine. In the beginning, yes we are sympathetic, we encounter a brave and rebellious teenager, in reduced and restrictive circumstances, living in a poor northerly town - Norley - industrial, brewery fumes, kids in the streets without shoes. Angel's mother runs the grocery shop - downstairs, and enjoys listening to the gossip of the local women. Angel has been sent to the local posh school for girls - which she hates; she doesn't fit in there either.
And then we have Angel's successful middle years in her twenties and thirties, her adoring friend Nora and most importantly Nora's brother, Esmé Howe-Nevinson. The point really is that horrible, awful empty person in the middle section. That is the eugh bit, the grind-your-teeth, dismal, soul-less bit; makes you want to throw the book at the wall bit. And you ask yourself over and over - WHAT - is the point of this awful messed up Angel??
Guess what - Taylor turns it around. Unbelievable! By the end - you feel completely different; well, I felt very differently about - Angel. Can only say guys - read it for yourselves - and don't throw it at the wall in the ugly middle bit.
In Angel - our main character spends her whole life, wanting to love and be loved; in its absence, she devotes her energies, time and skills to her career. Angel writes Mills & Boon type romances and she is, to a certain point, extremely successful, and this, in spite of the critics calling her books, trashy nonsense, pot-boilers, and worse. I could see, however, that maybe Taylor thought this was her present and possible future life also - a woman compensating herself with a career after trying the alternative one of marriage, housewife and children. Taylor was known for living a quiet life, devoting herself to her husband and her two children and writing her - incredible novels - in between. Our reading group, however, has discovered that Elizabeth Taylor had a secret love; an "on-again-off-again relationship" - I quote because the information came from Daniel - who is in our group. Steamy pot-boiler herself!
I don't normally want to know about the private lives of authors. I did that - big mistake, with Muriel Spark, who reminds me quite of lot of Taylor. They both have a talent for using themselves to re-create the characters in their novels.
And so it is with Taylor - she is a writer who is exclusively concerned with psychological reality - for sure she used her own experiences in all of those wonderful love moments. I can think of Tory (Victoria) in A View of the Harbour (1947) - those entanglements with her best friend's husband are so intensely real. Or Emily with Vinny A Game of Hide and Seek sitting on the rocks, in their secret little valley close to the shore - intense realism in how the couple's passion ignites, or Kate Heron with Charles - In a Summer Season (1961) - who sits with her on a picnic rug and asks - 'Are you really happy with Dermot?' And in Angel - those insights into the couple's sex-life:
Like many romantic narcissistic women she shied away from the final act of love-making. She would have lived in a world of courtship and hand-kissing if she could. Sex seemed to have nothing to do with her. It was a sudden reversal, not a continuation, of the delights of being wooed. She had to become a different person before she could endure it, and she was not always able, even for Esmé, to make the change. That desperate communication with herself in which she writes, holds good in love as well, he thought.
Smart guy that Esmé, needless to say he has married Angel - for her money.
Is that also Taylor when she re-creates the scenes between Theo Gilbright (Angel's publisher) and his wife Hermoine:
"HER life is one I shouldn't care to live," said Hermoine, when she and Theo were alone. "Did you notice the photograph of Angel garbed as one of the muses, sitting on a marble seat in a trance, with her mother standing up behind her at a respectful distance? It was among the conglomeration of stuff on the piano. . . .
Dinner will be dreadful, and only the first of three. Now if I put on the amber satin I shall clash furiously with her. Or was that a tea-gown she was wearing? I have read of tea-gowns. Oh dear and there are no canaries for me to feed if things get bad. I shall have to take refuge with that evil-looking parrot. (Theo listens in silence) . . .
Are you thinking that I all I say is in execrable taste? Because that is what you look as if you are thinking? ARE? you thinking that?"
(Theo says he thought Angel looked vulnerable - Theo is such a kind guy!)
"Forbearance! You are a spiteful little chatterbox." He put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her as she sat at the dressing-table. "If you go through this with flying-colours - but not so flying as to invite suspicion - I will buy you a nice present, a souvenir. I AM grateful, for I know you will really try in spite of all you say. And you aren't REALLY grey, you know, I can still see a lot of brown hairs."
She began to shake with laughter, and love for him brought sudden tears to her eyes, and she turned aside to hide them.
I loved that scene - a happy marriage between Theo and Hermione, but with its ups and downs as in REAL life.
I first encountered this novel, a good 12 or 15 years before, and put it down at the half-way point - I really disliked Angel; her ludicrous behaviours, her intensely solipsistic, and domineering nature and yes her cruelty to her mother. But I didn't know Taylor then, now I do. This time I read to the end - and the ending!! The last two sections! I think Parts 5 and 6 are the most wonderful parts of the book. Taylor is so clever, she gives us this awful heroine. In the beginning, yes we are sympathetic, we encounter a brave and rebellious teenager, in reduced and restrictive circumstances, living in a poor northerly town - Norley - industrial, brewery fumes, kids in the streets without shoes. Angel's mother runs the grocery shop - downstairs, and enjoys listening to the gossip of the local women. Angel has been sent to the local posh school for girls - which she hates; she doesn't fit in there either.
And then we have Angel's successful middle years in her twenties and thirties, her adoring friend Nora and most importantly Nora's brother, Esmé Howe-Nevinson. The point really is that horrible, awful empty person in the middle section. That is the eugh bit, the grind-your-teeth, dismal, soul-less bit; makes you want to throw the book at the wall bit. And you ask yourself over and over - WHAT - is the point of this awful messed up Angel??
Guess what - Taylor turns it around. Unbelievable! By the end - you feel completely different; well, I felt very differently about - Angel. Can only say guys - read it for yourselves - and don't throw it at the wall in the ugly middle bit.
May 25, 2025
3.75
The start I felt was much stronger, I liked the main character though and I am interested in more by her in the future x
The start I felt was much stronger, I liked the main character though and I am interested in more by her in the future x
December 13, 2015
Angel is quite a character, and this is quite a journey to go on. Those are the two things that come to my mind when thinking of this book.
This story is about Angel whom we meet when she's 15 years old. Angel is a very stubborn and egoistic girl who has no considerations as to what others might think and feel. All she cares about is herself and her wishes. Angel's biggest wish is to become a writer, and so she begins to write her first novel at the age of 15.
This is one of those novels that takes you through a whole life. As earlier stated, we meet Angel when she's 15 and we follow her throughout all the rest of her days. Things and characters change around her, and maybe Angel does too? That remains for the reader to discover.
I loved this book despite its intolerable protagonist. Angel is such a remarkable character, and her stubbornness often made me smile. I don't mind these kind of characters that provoke you, because in the end they entertain you and leave quite an impression on you.
This book is definitely worth a read if you like stories about writing, growing up and surviving life. It was one of those books that didn't keep me glued to its pages while reading it, but thinking back on it I can't help but appreciate it - as well as its main character - a lot.
This story is about Angel whom we meet when she's 15 years old. Angel is a very stubborn and egoistic girl who has no considerations as to what others might think and feel. All she cares about is herself and her wishes. Angel's biggest wish is to become a writer, and so she begins to write her first novel at the age of 15.
This is one of those novels that takes you through a whole life. As earlier stated, we meet Angel when she's 15 and we follow her throughout all the rest of her days. Things and characters change around her, and maybe Angel does too? That remains for the reader to discover.
I loved this book despite its intolerable protagonist. Angel is such a remarkable character, and her stubbornness often made me smile. I don't mind these kind of characters that provoke you, because in the end they entertain you and leave quite an impression on you.
This book is definitely worth a read if you like stories about writing, growing up and surviving life. It was one of those books that didn't keep me glued to its pages while reading it, but thinking back on it I can't help but appreciate it - as well as its main character - a lot.
Read
March 21, 2019This peculiar novel, perhaps too analytical to successfully work as satire, is a very chilling book for writers to read. This is the story of Angelica, who as a difficult teen was constantly telling stories in her head, bettering her own life in her imagination, or imagining others' lives. Her relatives, who have no interest in books or creativity, are appalled--they think she's a liar, a poser, dangerous.
How many writers have had to endure that attitude? In spite of Angel's difficult personality, the reader with imagination and a turn for the pen will sympathize with her situation, at least until she sells a novel in her mid-teens, and promptly rockets to the best seller status.
A while back, I was reading a review in Guardian about the diaries of Alison Uteley, a respected children's author who lived in the same city as Enid Blyton. The two were antipathetic to one another: A.U. utterly despised Blyton as a hack, and E.B. despised A.U. for all her awards. They apparently met outside a bookshop once, and A.U. said something condescending, after which Blyton pointed to the window and her books, and trumped the other by saying something to the effect of "At least I get read."
Angel hits the bigtime, and promptly starts believing herself to have become one of her own heroines. After all, she achieved the dream, right? Not only got published, she's famous! That has to mean that she is a great writer.
She soon has a fancy house, beautiful gowns, and she even finds and marries a handsome, troubled painter . . . who is a mess. Like her books. She never sees that it's their very trashiness that appeals--and meantime life moves inexorably on, World War II bringing a grim new atmosphere that doesn't leave time for her faffery, and she's gotten older . . .
Fiction is delusion, but somewhere in it is either a steadying sense of reality, or else a convincing depiction of how life ought to be. When delusion is built on delusion, well, you get Angel.
How many writers have had to endure that attitude? In spite of Angel's difficult personality, the reader with imagination and a turn for the pen will sympathize with her situation, at least until she sells a novel in her mid-teens, and promptly rockets to the best seller status.
A while back, I was reading a review in Guardian about the diaries of Alison Uteley, a respected children's author who lived in the same city as Enid Blyton. The two were antipathetic to one another: A.U. utterly despised Blyton as a hack, and E.B. despised A.U. for all her awards. They apparently met outside a bookshop once, and A.U. said something condescending, after which Blyton pointed to the window and her books, and trumped the other by saying something to the effect of "At least I get read."
Angel hits the bigtime, and promptly starts believing herself to have become one of her own heroines. After all, she achieved the dream, right? Not only got published, she's famous! That has to mean that she is a great writer.
She soon has a fancy house, beautiful gowns, and she even finds and marries a handsome, troubled painter . . . who is a mess. Like her books. She never sees that it's their very trashiness that appeals--and meantime life moves inexorably on, World War II bringing a grim new atmosphere that doesn't leave time for her faffery, and she's gotten older . . .
Fiction is delusion, but somewhere in it is either a steadying sense of reality, or else a convincing depiction of how life ought to be. When delusion is built on delusion, well, you get Angel.
September 10, 2023
In Angel, Elizabeth Taylor has created a rather repugnant, but absolutely fascinating character.
Angel is rather unusual for an Elizabeth Taylor novel, in that it follows the life of the title character from the age of 15, when she decides that she is going to become a famous writer, to the end of her life. She is a horrible person who is narcissistic and totally selfish. She hates her life, living with her Mother in a flat above the shop that the family run. Her Mum and Aunt spend their money on an expensive education for her in order that she may have a better life than them.She weaves a fantasy about Paradise House, which will be hers one day, telling two younger girls that she walks to school about it. When she is caught out in her lies, she can't face anyone so pretends to be ill and starts to write her first novel. It becomes a success, though critics hate it, (they are all wrong, of course). After this, she becomes more or less unbearable. And the rest, you'll have to read it to find out, (unless you already have).
Loved it.
Angel is rather unusual for an Elizabeth Taylor novel, in that it follows the life of the title character from the age of 15, when she decides that she is going to become a famous writer, to the end of her life. She is a horrible person who is narcissistic and totally selfish. She hates her life, living with her Mother in a flat above the shop that the family run. Her Mum and Aunt spend their money on an expensive education for her in order that she may have a better life than them.She weaves a fantasy about Paradise House, which will be hers one day, telling two younger girls that she walks to school about it. When she is caught out in her lies, she can't face anyone so pretends to be ill and starts to write her first novel. It becomes a success, though critics hate it, (they are all wrong, of course). After this, she becomes more or less unbearable. And the rest, you'll have to read it to find out, (unless you already have).
Loved it.
January 1, 2022
She sensed a promise of tenderness, the quality she always searched for and so often brusquely rejected, not knowing how to deal with its effects upon herself, suspicious of the emotions it aroused in her.
Rather disconcertingly, Hilary Mantel in her introduction to this book describes Angel as a monster. But this is Elizabeth Taylor and while some of Angel's actions might certainly be monstrous , Taylor is far too nuanced and sophisticated a novelist to create such a one-dimensional character.
Angel is undoubtedly a narcissist, unable to experience the world through anyone else's eyes other than her own; but she's also a rebel, at least when young, as she rejects the opinions of her authoritarian teacher and refuses to knuckle down under the unambitious and socially proper aspirations of her mother and aunt. Recognising that 'she was bereft of the power to rescue herself, the brains or the beauty by which other young women made their escape', she fashions an alternative liberation for herself by harnessing the power of her imagination and story-telling (which some people term 'lies') and writing her first best-selling novel at the age of fifteen.
As the story develops, I came more and more to feel how pathetic and pitiable Angel is. Her will and resolution are so strong as she writes book after book to achieve her childhood dream, upsetting class and social status in a transgressive way - yet she is also ill-educated and refuses to learn anything; she has no self-reflection or ability to know herself; and she's in a constant struggle to push away any self-knowledge or the acknowledgement that all about her is not perfect. She falls in love and is loyal to her husband, but never knows him and cannot see how he feels about her. She is even sexually frigid, it appears, closed off, self-contained and solipsistic. And the tragedy is that Angel does have people who have loved her: her mother, Theo, her publisher and friend, Nora - though she herself pushes them away.
Reading this book, my fourth by the severely underrated Taylor, reminded me again of what a cruel writer she is both in her refusal of all sentimentality as well as in her satirical portraits, here of Lady Blaine especially. She's almost the direct opposite of the kind of novelist that we gather Angel is whose books are laughed at by critics and reviewers but which are popular best-sellers despite their histrionic tones, the laughable mistakes due to ignorance (someone opens a bottle of champagne with a corkscrew) and the gaudy writing (I was thinking something akin to Barbara Cartland, maybe?).
Taylor, on the other hand, is excellent on the small tragedies of women's lives and while she is detailed and acutely observational, she also writes with that characteristic and sometimes grotesque sense of humour that stops her books becoming maudlin. And this one raises interesting questions, too, about the personality and craft of writers (where does having an active imagination become self-destructive and an active retreat from reality?), and the shifting values of cultural capital.
June 7, 2012
Elizabeth Taylor's (not that one) Angel is a fascinating book. The novel, a start-to-finish analysis and description of a commercially successful but critically panned woman author, intricately portrays the main character's and the characters in her orbits' insecurities, despondence, and fragile self-delusions, the kind that hurt to break.
Early in the book Angel, a child living with her mother above her family's general store, gets busted for telling fanciful lies to neighborhood children. Her response is neither plucky nor tragic; she refuses to go outside, pretty much, and begins to write obsessively about Paradise House, where her aunt works as a maid but which Angel has never seen. Angel doesn't write in an airy, fairy tale-ish manner. She writes with a “I'm going to write every second about this world I want to create when I get the hell out of this place” obsession. And rather than frame this obsession as either a sad decision or a dedicated literary endeavor Taylor frames Angel's evolution as brittle and toxic. But even after a mean-spirited and socially inept Angel's first novel sells the rags to riches cliches are disrupted. The people with whom she interacts have their own needs and desires and, while a reader could argue that no one's there for the right (whatever that means) reasons, I found myself concurrently understanding and recoiling from the characters. I recognized in Taylor's psychology elements I'm loathe to see in myself. And rather than burn out in an exciting, hackneyed climax Angel twists, decays, and degenerates into elegant dust. It's better to burn out than fade away. But some of us, probably most, fade away.
Angel was a discovery, the kind of book (and I don't do this often) I want to push on other people, women especially, because I want to hear what they think. Angel reads like a carefully orchestrated disruption of literary conventions. I admire this book as much as I liked it. And while I wouldn't want to hang out with the title character, I....I don't know how I feel about her. I don't feel a patronizing sympathy. I wouldn't want to hang out with her because, we'll, she's a selfish bitch. But I wouldn't demonize her as much as I'd like to keep my distance. I don't know that I've thought as deeply about a character in a long time. And that's as good a reason as any to recommend Angel.
Early in the book Angel, a child living with her mother above her family's general store, gets busted for telling fanciful lies to neighborhood children. Her response is neither plucky nor tragic; she refuses to go outside, pretty much, and begins to write obsessively about Paradise House, where her aunt works as a maid but which Angel has never seen. Angel doesn't write in an airy, fairy tale-ish manner. She writes with a “I'm going to write every second about this world I want to create when I get the hell out of this place” obsession. And rather than frame this obsession as either a sad decision or a dedicated literary endeavor Taylor frames Angel's evolution as brittle and toxic. But even after a mean-spirited and socially inept Angel's first novel sells the rags to riches cliches are disrupted. The people with whom she interacts have their own needs and desires and, while a reader could argue that no one's there for the right (whatever that means) reasons, I found myself concurrently understanding and recoiling from the characters. I recognized in Taylor's psychology elements I'm loathe to see in myself. And rather than burn out in an exciting, hackneyed climax Angel twists, decays, and degenerates into elegant dust. It's better to burn out than fade away. But some of us, probably most, fade away.
Angel was a discovery, the kind of book (and I don't do this often) I want to push on other people, women especially, because I want to hear what they think. Angel reads like a carefully orchestrated disruption of literary conventions. I admire this book as much as I liked it. And while I wouldn't want to hang out with the title character, I....I don't know how I feel about her. I don't feel a patronizing sympathy. I wouldn't want to hang out with her because, we'll, she's a selfish bitch. But I wouldn't demonize her as much as I'd like to keep my distance. I don't know that I've thought as deeply about a character in a long time. And that's as good a reason as any to recommend Angel.
May 6, 2023
I don’t usually read a number of novels by the same author in close proximity - I read one, enjoy it, and make a mental note to read more, but often fail to get round to it. This is my third Taylor this year, and I’m having such a good time reading her work. While she has a recognizable style and themes, each novel is very much its own - she’s not telling the same story over and over. And she really delves into character in interesting ways.
This novel focuses on the eponymous Angel Deverell, a single-minded grocer’s daughter (no, not Thatcher) who, when the tale opens in 1901 is 15, sullen, and about to decide to write a novel. She does, and it becomes a bestselling potboiler, setting Angel on her path to riches and away from her origins. Angel is a fascinating character, narcissistic and unyielding, but also at times admirable in her determination and pathetic in her flaws. I was purple-prosed and eccentric in my early teens, and could relate to the awful Angel’s early incarnation, though not her terrific fortune. There is a small and interesting collection of supporting players in Angel’s life over the decades - a devoted companion, a philandering but beloved husband, a patient publisher, a lazy servant, a would-be biographer of her husband, an overbearing woman friend - but the focus is squarely on Angel, and how she adapts to changing circumstances throughout her life by steadfastly refusing to adapt and relying, always, on her imagination.
“She never had any especial friends and most people seemed unreal to her.”
“A great deal of what she encountered irritated her, running contrary to her sensibilities. She had removed herself, romantically, from the evidence of her senses: the reality of what she could learn by touching, tasting, was banished as a trivial annoyance, scored out as irrelevant.”
“He was always kind to human beings, in the manner of a man who does not like dogs but would not countenance any cruelty to one. He gave them his time and some of his attention. Restless shadows, they moved before him.”
“Motives, on both sides, were spiteful and the visit was stimulating for that reason.”
“The only people she knew were old; all that was happening in their world were small discomforts or fears that death might come a little sooner than they had bargained for, and in a different manner from what they had hoped.”
This novel focuses on the eponymous Angel Deverell, a single-minded grocer’s daughter (no, not Thatcher) who, when the tale opens in 1901 is 15, sullen, and about to decide to write a novel. She does, and it becomes a bestselling potboiler, setting Angel on her path to riches and away from her origins. Angel is a fascinating character, narcissistic and unyielding, but also at times admirable in her determination and pathetic in her flaws. I was purple-prosed and eccentric in my early teens, and could relate to the awful Angel’s early incarnation, though not her terrific fortune. There is a small and interesting collection of supporting players in Angel’s life over the decades - a devoted companion, a philandering but beloved husband, a patient publisher, a lazy servant, a would-be biographer of her husband, an overbearing woman friend - but the focus is squarely on Angel, and how she adapts to changing circumstances throughout her life by steadfastly refusing to adapt and relying, always, on her imagination.
“She never had any especial friends and most people seemed unreal to her.”
“A great deal of what she encountered irritated her, running contrary to her sensibilities. She had removed herself, romantically, from the evidence of her senses: the reality of what she could learn by touching, tasting, was banished as a trivial annoyance, scored out as irrelevant.”
“He was always kind to human beings, in the manner of a man who does not like dogs but would not countenance any cruelty to one. He gave them his time and some of his attention. Restless shadows, they moved before him.”
“Motives, on both sides, were spiteful and the visit was stimulating for that reason.”
“The only people she knew were old; all that was happening in their world were small discomforts or fears that death might come a little sooner than they had bargained for, and in a different manner from what they had hoped.”
February 24, 2018
This was a delightful character study that I thoroughly enjoyed all the way through. Meet Angelica Deverell, a poor, working class girl who lives mostly in her head (which is full of dramatic, romantic daydreams), and has no empathy for other people.
Angelica (Angel) decides that she wants to be a famous novelist, and although she does not read and has shown no interest in literature previously, she relentlessly works towards her goal. The story starts out in 1900, when Angel is 15, and follows her throughout her life.
Although Angel has a simple, working class background, she behaves like the snobbish aristocrat she longs to be, and she does her best to deny the truth of her background, and to escape from her drab, boring surroundings into her fantasies:
All that she saw and felt tired her, and she longed to shut out the world and be secure in the womb of her imagination.
Once, when she tells her editor the truth about herself, she ends the story like this:
I don't want anyone to know anything about me, she said anxiously. None of what I told you seems true to me and I know that one day I shall stop believing in it.
Angel sometimes has short, panicky identity crises throughout her life, where she suddenly realizes an uncomfortable truth, but she always manages to push these away and sink back into her fantasy world. All self doubt and criticism, and drab reality, is pushed away because it is too scary, too boring or too depressing. Angel cannot stand reality:
Her panic-stricken face would be reflected back at her as she struggled to deny her identity, slowly cosseting herself away from the truth. She was learning how to triumph over reality, and the truth was beginning to leave her in peace.
Angel has no taste and very little knowledge of the real world. Her books are both loved and ridiculed. She dresses so strangely that people stare at her in the street, and she thinks they recognize the famous authoress and turns to admire her as she passes them. Yes, Angel is awful to people. And people in turn make fun of her behind her back. It's funny and sad at the same time.
Yet she still felt something obdurate in herself, even in her state of frailty and defeat. It was a hard, physical pain in her breast, which might have been indigestion, but was vanity.
Angel is easily insulted and could probably be diagnosed as a narcissist. She says and does some pretty hurtful things to people, without understanding what she is doing. What happens to her own mother in the end, was very sad to read.
Mean Angel. Poor Angel. In one instance (or maybe just in the movie? I 'm not sure...) someone says that you can laugh at the novelist but admire the woman. I get that, completely. Angel broke free of her constraining background, which was not an easy thing to do, and changed her life through pure strength of will. She was true to herself and made no compromises. Ever. This is shown very clearly in Angels death-scene. The last clear thought she has is I am Angel Deverell!
This book shows us that a character does not need to be likeable for the book itself to be likeable. And even if Angel says and does some pretty hurtful things, it's clear that the narrator is also sympathetic towards her. And so was I.
Angelica (Angel) decides that she wants to be a famous novelist, and although she does not read and has shown no interest in literature previously, she relentlessly works towards her goal. The story starts out in 1900, when Angel is 15, and follows her throughout her life.
Although Angel has a simple, working class background, she behaves like the snobbish aristocrat she longs to be, and she does her best to deny the truth of her background, and to escape from her drab, boring surroundings into her fantasies:
All that she saw and felt tired her, and she longed to shut out the world and be secure in the womb of her imagination.
Once, when she tells her editor the truth about herself, she ends the story like this:
I don't want anyone to know anything about me, she said anxiously. None of what I told you seems true to me and I know that one day I shall stop believing in it.
Angel sometimes has short, panicky identity crises throughout her life, where she suddenly realizes an uncomfortable truth, but she always manages to push these away and sink back into her fantasy world. All self doubt and criticism, and drab reality, is pushed away because it is too scary, too boring or too depressing. Angel cannot stand reality:
Her panic-stricken face would be reflected back at her as she struggled to deny her identity, slowly cosseting herself away from the truth. She was learning how to triumph over reality, and the truth was beginning to leave her in peace.
Angel has no taste and very little knowledge of the real world. Her books are both loved and ridiculed. She dresses so strangely that people stare at her in the street, and she thinks they recognize the famous authoress and turns to admire her as she passes them. Yes, Angel is awful to people. And people in turn make fun of her behind her back. It's funny and sad at the same time.
Yet she still felt something obdurate in herself, even in her state of frailty and defeat. It was a hard, physical pain in her breast, which might have been indigestion, but was vanity.
Angel is easily insulted and could probably be diagnosed as a narcissist. She says and does some pretty hurtful things to people, without understanding what she is doing. What happens to her own mother in the end, was very sad to read.
Mean Angel. Poor Angel. In one instance (or maybe just in the movie? I 'm not sure...) someone says that you can laugh at the novelist but admire the woman. I get that, completely. Angel broke free of her constraining background, which was not an easy thing to do, and changed her life through pure strength of will. She was true to herself and made no compromises. Ever. This is shown very clearly in Angels death-scene. The last clear thought she has is I am Angel Deverell!
This book shows us that a character does not need to be likeable for the book itself to be likeable. And even if Angel says and does some pretty hurtful things, it's clear that the narrator is also sympathetic towards her. And so was I.
May 15, 2020
It's official: there is a new arrival on my favourite authors' list. Enter Elizabeth Taylor.
Review to come.
Review to come.
April 9, 2023
Elizabeth Taylor does not disappoint. Her sharp, but never cruel, observation uncovers much in us that we would prefer to keep hidden, or not admit; but she does not condemn. I could certainly resonate at times with Angel, our eponymous heroine, though she is no angel, but a vain, selfish girl who does not improve one whit with age but continues into maturity with – or by means of - an almost unbelievable conceit and arrogance. She is the daughter of a shopkeeper in an industrial town and at fifteen years old has an epiphany; she is, or will be, a great writer, and thereby will escape her shabby surroundings. Her writing is romanticised rubbish, but at the turn of the 20th century there were no televised soaps!
I always try not give too much of the story away, but the blurb on the back of my edition does say that the book evokes the life of the real-life novelist Marie Corelli. Without going into detail there I can mention that while Angel’s opinion of herself and her writings is highly inflated (and utterly humourless!) the reactions of others to her provide for me the humour and much of the interest of this book. Literary critics aside, the other characters in the book are drawn to her, as a moth to a flame, almost under a spell, not only because her books bring them wealth but because of the sheer intensity of her writing. For me the most interesting observation, by the character Esmé, is that this almost desperate power emerges because she communicates not with her reader, but with herself, with her own, dominant, needs and desires. Throughout the book Angel’s strength and courage soar above her utter self-absorption. Those around her are but satellites, most especially her “brisk, brave, vivacious mother”, who for the teenage Angel is little more than a personal servant, and something of an embarrassment.
I loved the detail of how she finds a publisher. He, Theo, sees her potential, and his decent care of her is a steady light in the book. Is she appreciative of this? By moments, perhaps? Well, what do you imagine?! But she has her vulnerable side, and yes, of course Elizabeth Taylor knows just how to evoke our sympathy for this determined young girl, and in her later life, our pity.
Beyond what Angel is and what she makes of her life is the inevitability of outliving one’s time; and where is the line between eccentricity and insanity? How many of those whom we call geniuses were hovering on this faint, dancing perimeter? Angel is a laughable figure – this is made clear from the outset – but her conviction, her vision, her endurance, her passion, her great and astounding ability to see the world as she wishes it to be . . . we admire, we pity, and we share.
I could hardly put it down! Looking up Marie Corelli in Wikipedia, I found a reference to “Angel” and discovered that there is a film of the book, made in 2007, Elizabeth Taylor having experienced something of a comeback lately. Her books, then, have lasted beyond their time, and deservedly so.
I always try not give too much of the story away, but the blurb on the back of my edition does say that the book evokes the life of the real-life novelist Marie Corelli. Without going into detail there I can mention that while Angel’s opinion of herself and her writings is highly inflated (and utterly humourless!) the reactions of others to her provide for me the humour and much of the interest of this book. Literary critics aside, the other characters in the book are drawn to her, as a moth to a flame, almost under a spell, not only because her books bring them wealth but because of the sheer intensity of her writing. For me the most interesting observation, by the character Esmé, is that this almost desperate power emerges because she communicates not with her reader, but with herself, with her own, dominant, needs and desires. Throughout the book Angel’s strength and courage soar above her utter self-absorption. Those around her are but satellites, most especially her “brisk, brave, vivacious mother”, who for the teenage Angel is little more than a personal servant, and something of an embarrassment.
I loved the detail of how she finds a publisher. He, Theo, sees her potential, and his decent care of her is a steady light in the book. Is she appreciative of this? By moments, perhaps? Well, what do you imagine?! But she has her vulnerable side, and yes, of course Elizabeth Taylor knows just how to evoke our sympathy for this determined young girl, and in her later life, our pity.
Beyond what Angel is and what she makes of her life is the inevitability of outliving one’s time; and where is the line between eccentricity and insanity? How many of those whom we call geniuses were hovering on this faint, dancing perimeter? Angel is a laughable figure – this is made clear from the outset – but her conviction, her vision, her endurance, her passion, her great and astounding ability to see the world as she wishes it to be . . . we admire, we pity, and we share.
I could hardly put it down! Looking up Marie Corelli in Wikipedia, I found a reference to “Angel” and discovered that there is a film of the book, made in 2007, Elizabeth Taylor having experienced something of a comeback lately. Her books, then, have lasted beyond their time, and deservedly so.
May 26, 2020
#lerosclássicos
“He loved her, almost as if he had invented her – bad fairy, wicked stepmother, peevish godess, whatever she was.
À primeira vista, este livro não tem nada a seu favor. Se o título “Angel” nos remete para um romance de cordel, o nome de autora ainda o faz parecer menos literário, razão pela qual a autora ficou conhecida como “a outra Elizabeth Taylor”. E depois, há a capa... A Relógio D’Água nem sempre faz as melhores opções estéticas, mas pôr metade de uma rapariga com ar de hippie esgrouviada a retratar a história de uma rapariga inglesa que almeja ser uma escritora famosa e viver num ambiente de luxo e requinte, na primeira metade do século XX, é um terrível erro de casting.
Ainda que tenha um fraquinho por personagens agrestes, Angel testou os meus limites, já que a definiria como uma protagonista estúpida, mitómana, melindrosa, insensível, vaidosa, orgulhosa, inculta, fantasiosa, romântica, sem o mínimo sentido de humor nem de autocrítica. Bastariam metade destes defeitos para me causar repulsa, mas a verdade é que, todos juntos, formam uma figura fascinante, cujo percurso desde os 15 anos segui com a maior das curiosidades. Há aqui algo de sátira, mas a personagem de Angel nunca me pareceu uma caricatura, porque a escrita elegante de Elizabeth Taylor e o seu domínio da narrativa nunca permitem que passe para lá do limite do credível. Ainda agora terminei este livro e já sinto saudades desta excêntrica inesquecível.
“She had warded off friendship and stayed lonely and made such fortifications within her own mind that the truth could not pierce it. At the slightest air of censure in the world about her, up had gone the barricades, the strenuous resistance begun which she was preserved in her own imagination, beautiful, clever, successful and beloved.
“I blame myself for what I have done – corpse-eating, as Lady Baines so rightly describes it. I am sure that we can live very well on vegetables and eggs”
“But what will Czar live on?"
“He can live on eggs as well."
“Poor eggs!” said Esmé. “What fiendish brutality!”
“He loved her, almost as if he had invented her – bad fairy, wicked stepmother, peevish godess, whatever she was.
À primeira vista, este livro não tem nada a seu favor. Se o título “Angel” nos remete para um romance de cordel, o nome de autora ainda o faz parecer menos literário, razão pela qual a autora ficou conhecida como “a outra Elizabeth Taylor”. E depois, há a capa... A Relógio D’Água nem sempre faz as melhores opções estéticas, mas pôr metade de uma rapariga com ar de hippie esgrouviada a retratar a história de uma rapariga inglesa que almeja ser uma escritora famosa e viver num ambiente de luxo e requinte, na primeira metade do século XX, é um terrível erro de casting.
Ainda que tenha um fraquinho por personagens agrestes, Angel testou os meus limites, já que a definiria como uma protagonista estúpida, mitómana, melindrosa, insensível, vaidosa, orgulhosa, inculta, fantasiosa, romântica, sem o mínimo sentido de humor nem de autocrítica. Bastariam metade destes defeitos para me causar repulsa, mas a verdade é que, todos juntos, formam uma figura fascinante, cujo percurso desde os 15 anos segui com a maior das curiosidades. Há aqui algo de sátira, mas a personagem de Angel nunca me pareceu uma caricatura, porque a escrita elegante de Elizabeth Taylor e o seu domínio da narrativa nunca permitem que passe para lá do limite do credível. Ainda agora terminei este livro e já sinto saudades desta excêntrica inesquecível.
“She had warded off friendship and stayed lonely and made such fortifications within her own mind that the truth could not pierce it. At the slightest air of censure in the world about her, up had gone the barricades, the strenuous resistance begun which she was preserved in her own imagination, beautiful, clever, successful and beloved.
“I blame myself for what I have done – corpse-eating, as Lady Baines so rightly describes it. I am sure that we can live very well on vegetables and eggs”
“But what will Czar live on?"
“He can live on eggs as well."
“Poor eggs!” said Esmé. “What fiendish brutality!”
May 1, 2023
This is not Taylor’s usual book. She pursues her signature theme of passion conflicting with propriety but does so in an inverted, solipsistic way. Her secondary characters add much wry humor to the plot. The novel is worthwhile but not my favorite Taylor.
January 15, 2022
I read this for a discussion in the Reading the 20th Century group. It is my fourth Taylor novel and so far they are all very different, though always enjoyable to read. This one tells the life story of Angelica (Angel), a shopkeeper's daughter who builds on the fantasy stories she spins to schoolfriends in her northern industrial town to write a fearless first novel which brings her early fame/notoriety.
She is a composite figure at least partly inspired by several real but mostly forgotten romantic novelists who were popular in the Edwardian era. Angel's naive headstrong character is drawn with all of the subtlety and black humour that her own work is said to lack, and having bought Paradise House, the decaying hall where her aunt was once a servant, we see her and the house decline together.
She is a composite figure at least partly inspired by several real but mostly forgotten romantic novelists who were popular in the Edwardian era. Angel's naive headstrong character is drawn with all of the subtlety and black humour that her own work is said to lack, and having bought Paradise House, the decaying hall where her aunt was once a servant, we see her and the house decline together.
November 13, 2013
Elizabeth Taylor (the midcentury British writer) has had the misfortune of sharing a name with one of the twentieth century’s biggest celebrities. A clear-eyed, morally incisive novelist overshadowed by her cinematic namesake: Taylor would probably be the first to chuckle at the irony. Her wonderful 1957 novel Angel is a novel about the delusional echo-chamber in which a lot of people live–writers in particular–and it strikes its characteristic tone from the very first sentences:
--
“‘into the vast vacuity of the empyrean,’” Miss Dawson read. “And can you tell me what ‘empyrean’ means?”
“It means,” Angel said. Her tongue moistened her lips. She glanced out of the classroom window at the sky beyond the bare trees. “It means ‘the highest heavens’.”
“Yes, the sky,” Miss Dawson said suspiciously.
--
This is our introduction to Angelica Deverell, the romantic, weirdly self-possessed young novelist who claims she spends her free time playing the harp and never met a Thesaurus word she didn’t love. She is one of the more deliciously repulsive characters I’ve encountered in fiction lately. Born into a family of grocers in a gray working-class English town, Angel (as she’s called) spends her time dodging school, avoiding any kind of housework, and making up lies about herself, with which she entertains the neighbor children. Her lush and moonlit mythology revolves around Paradise House, the estate where her aunt is employed as a servant. These tales soon spread through the small town, shaming Angel’s mother Mrs. Deverell, who has the impossible task of trying to raise this child on her own. When Angel’s aunt suggests her niece for an open position at Paradise House, Angel’s response is bracing and almost terrifying in its total arrogance and insensitivity.
Angel, meanwhile, faking illness to get out of school, feels the first stirrings of literary ambition. In a feverish trance she scrawls her first novel in composition books. What few glimpses we get of this book are more than enough to infer its badness: some people use a corkscrew to open a bottle of champagne, and a young lady’s honor depends upon the outcome of a game of cards.
It is of course a wild success. Though Angel claims not to read, and knows nothing about the literary world–she sends her novel to the publisher she glimpses for a second on an open page in a public library. The book is savagely reviewed but its hyperbolic prose and light sexual scandal (sound familiar?) makes it a minor sensation. Soon the young writer is traveling to London and contemplating follow-ups with her publisher:
--
“Do you think you will write another novel?”
“Oh yes. I can let you have another one in a few months.”
“So soon? You must be careful not to tire yourself too quickly, or write yourself out.”
“I should never do that,” she said simply and drank her tea.
“What is the theme of the new book?”
“It is about an actress.”
“Are you interested in the theatre, Miss Deverell?”
“I have never been to one.”
“Then you are a great reader, perhaps?”
“No, I don’t read much. I haven’t got any books, and nowadays I am always writing.”
“But even so, most authors take some interest in the works of others. Is there no Public Library you could join?”
A little colour came into her cheeks and she said, “I don’t think I should want to.”
--
In this dialogue Taylor coolly reveals all the qualities that make Angel second-rate, and as Hilary Mantel writes in her introduction, “Angel is a book in which an accomplished, deft, and somewhat underrated writer has a great deal of fun at the expense of a crass, graceless, and wildly overpaid one.” Perhaps the funniest instance of this is when Angel decides (mid-novel) to switch the setting of her latest book from modern-day England to ancient Greece, without doing any research. But at the same time I think Taylor sees a little bit of herself in Angel, as do I. What writer could go on if they didn’t secretly believe that their own work was more fascinating, more worthwhile than many others’? There’s an egotism inherent to the craft, and while Angel exhibits a bloated, grotesque form of it, the sins Taylor attributes to Angel — inflated self-regard, a reflexive indifference to others, absorption in fantasy — could also be considered occupational hazards of a life devoted to fiction.
In the second half of the novel, the continued success of Angel’s books leads toward the realization of her childhood dreams and Paradise House. It is in the novel’s latter stages that really displays the subtlety of Taylor’s gifts as a novelist, as we see Angel through the gentle mockery of her publisher and his wife; through the eyes of her husband Esme, who seems to be a better painter than she is a writer, though Angel is the only one who buys his paintings; through her long-time companion, Esme’s sister, an aspiring poet with the perfectly Edwardian name Nora Howe-Nevinson.
"The next day Nora returned. She was to stay for more than thirty years and to make herself useful untiringly, relieving Angel of many burdens. Her service to literature was more difficult to assess. She gave up writing her own poetry to devote herself to her friend. The sacrifice helped to lengthen the list of Angel’s books. The poetry was lost and the novels were gained, and posterity was as indifferent as it could be about both."
It is the nature of such sacrifices, such devotions, that Taylor interrogates in Angel, and she does this with no sentimentality whatsoever. If Taylor can see the monster inside every writer, she can also sympathize with the longings of her difficult, willful, singular creation–and see her human sufferings and disappointments. By the end of the novel we feel for Angel, much as we would hate to become anything like her.
--
“‘into the vast vacuity of the empyrean,’” Miss Dawson read. “And can you tell me what ‘empyrean’ means?”
“It means,” Angel said. Her tongue moistened her lips. She glanced out of the classroom window at the sky beyond the bare trees. “It means ‘the highest heavens’.”
“Yes, the sky,” Miss Dawson said suspiciously.
--
This is our introduction to Angelica Deverell, the romantic, weirdly self-possessed young novelist who claims she spends her free time playing the harp and never met a Thesaurus word she didn’t love. She is one of the more deliciously repulsive characters I’ve encountered in fiction lately. Born into a family of grocers in a gray working-class English town, Angel (as she’s called) spends her time dodging school, avoiding any kind of housework, and making up lies about herself, with which she entertains the neighbor children. Her lush and moonlit mythology revolves around Paradise House, the estate where her aunt is employed as a servant. These tales soon spread through the small town, shaming Angel’s mother Mrs. Deverell, who has the impossible task of trying to raise this child on her own. When Angel’s aunt suggests her niece for an open position at Paradise House, Angel’s response is bracing and almost terrifying in its total arrogance and insensitivity.
Angel, meanwhile, faking illness to get out of school, feels the first stirrings of literary ambition. In a feverish trance she scrawls her first novel in composition books. What few glimpses we get of this book are more than enough to infer its badness: some people use a corkscrew to open a bottle of champagne, and a young lady’s honor depends upon the outcome of a game of cards.
It is of course a wild success. Though Angel claims not to read, and knows nothing about the literary world–she sends her novel to the publisher she glimpses for a second on an open page in a public library. The book is savagely reviewed but its hyperbolic prose and light sexual scandal (sound familiar?) makes it a minor sensation. Soon the young writer is traveling to London and contemplating follow-ups with her publisher:
--
“Do you think you will write another novel?”
“Oh yes. I can let you have another one in a few months.”
“So soon? You must be careful not to tire yourself too quickly, or write yourself out.”
“I should never do that,” she said simply and drank her tea.
“What is the theme of the new book?”
“It is about an actress.”
“Are you interested in the theatre, Miss Deverell?”
“I have never been to one.”
“Then you are a great reader, perhaps?”
“No, I don’t read much. I haven’t got any books, and nowadays I am always writing.”
“But even so, most authors take some interest in the works of others. Is there no Public Library you could join?”
A little colour came into her cheeks and she said, “I don’t think I should want to.”
--
In this dialogue Taylor coolly reveals all the qualities that make Angel second-rate, and as Hilary Mantel writes in her introduction, “Angel is a book in which an accomplished, deft, and somewhat underrated writer has a great deal of fun at the expense of a crass, graceless, and wildly overpaid one.” Perhaps the funniest instance of this is when Angel decides (mid-novel) to switch the setting of her latest book from modern-day England to ancient Greece, without doing any research. But at the same time I think Taylor sees a little bit of herself in Angel, as do I. What writer could go on if they didn’t secretly believe that their own work was more fascinating, more worthwhile than many others’? There’s an egotism inherent to the craft, and while Angel exhibits a bloated, grotesque form of it, the sins Taylor attributes to Angel — inflated self-regard, a reflexive indifference to others, absorption in fantasy — could also be considered occupational hazards of a life devoted to fiction.
In the second half of the novel, the continued success of Angel’s books leads toward the realization of her childhood dreams and Paradise House. It is in the novel’s latter stages that really displays the subtlety of Taylor’s gifts as a novelist, as we see Angel through the gentle mockery of her publisher and his wife; through the eyes of her husband Esme, who seems to be a better painter than she is a writer, though Angel is the only one who buys his paintings; through her long-time companion, Esme’s sister, an aspiring poet with the perfectly Edwardian name Nora Howe-Nevinson.
"The next day Nora returned. She was to stay for more than thirty years and to make herself useful untiringly, relieving Angel of many burdens. Her service to literature was more difficult to assess. She gave up writing her own poetry to devote herself to her friend. The sacrifice helped to lengthen the list of Angel’s books. The poetry was lost and the novels were gained, and posterity was as indifferent as it could be about both."
It is the nature of such sacrifices, such devotions, that Taylor interrogates in Angel, and she does this with no sentimentality whatsoever. If Taylor can see the monster inside every writer, she can also sympathize with the longings of her difficult, willful, singular creation–and see her human sufferings and disappointments. By the end of the novel we feel for Angel, much as we would hate to become anything like her.
April 13, 2020
8 am (this time stamp is important…read on…)
Taken in its totality and after sleeping over this, I would rate this as 3.45 ( 😊 ) rounded down to 3 stars. Initially it started out quite good, then it started becoming absurd, then super-absurd, and with 91 pages to go if this had been my first read of Elizabeth Taylor I might have not finished it. But I have read six of her novels and so I was determined to see it through. Actually the last 91 pages were quite good. I took 3 pages of notes…writing down words I did not understand, writing down what I thought were key points that I did not want to forget, noting at points where things were absurd, and noting some humorous lines from protagonists.
Words I did not understand that I had to look up: vitiate (to corrupt morally; invalidate); facetious (witty, jocular); pettifogulising (pettifogging: placing undue emphasis on petty details NOTE: I could not find the word ‘pettifogulising in the OED); cosseting.
She had this phrase: “…cosseting herself away from the truth” but in the OED it means “pampering, petting, fondling”…so I still don’t get it ☹
Major protagonists:
Angel (Angelica); Mrs. Deverell (her mother); Aunt Lottie (her aunt); Theo Gilbright (her publisher); Esme Howe-Nevinson (a mediocre artists who is a total loser who she eventually ends up marrying: Nora Howe-Nevinson (Esme’s sister who is well-to-do but has no self-confidence and ends up sort of being Angel’s maid soon after she meets Angel…like for 30 years); Marvell (later in life, Angel and Esme’s servant-chauffer).
Synopsis with attempts to refrain from spoilers: Angel who is poor and 15, lives above a grocery store with her mother, and drops out of school, and begins to write a novel (she fancies herself a writer) and after two attempts gets it published…non-intellectuals love it and she continues to write more and more novels building up a faithful following, moves into more luxurious surroundings and lives extravagantly, and says whatever she wants to say to others without caring if feelings are hurt…falls in love with Esme although he does not fall in love with her right away…but somehow some way they do get married later on…and Nora ends up keeping up Angel’s mansion. Then World War I comes upon them and the book ends circa end or after World War II. Lots of years elapse…most of the telling of the tale is between 1900 and 1918 I would say.
Lines I thought were funny:
• Esme is talking to one of Angel’s friends who is an ardent vegetarian and anti-vivisectionist and talking about slaughterhouses: Her: “If we had to do it ourselves, or even be present when it was done, there would not be one of us who was not a vegetarian.” Esme: “And poor little beans, too, shredded to bits and dropped into boiling water.”
• I never heard of this often-used phrase being used in quite this way: “It was the burden of her conversation, that Madam’s death had been propitious indeed: all the same, she dwelt on the picture of her revolving in her grave at the sorry decline of the old home.”
Halfway through the book I write down this comment to myself: She reminds me of Trump!!! You can make of that what you will. 😊
There were two points in the book in which Angel’s persona was nicely encapsulated (and it was good writing):
• Perspective from a newspaper reporter who had studied up on her and knew some of her past life: “Perhaps she saw nothing as it was, everything as it should be, though doubtless never had been; thought she retained whatever her hands had once touched: fame, love , money. Like a fortune-teller in reverse, he knew what she had been, and could tell what she had had by her assumption that it was all there still…”
• From her publisher, Theo: “He had always been glad to get away from Angel; she tired and exasperated him; but he had never been able to replace his first impression of her with any other. At that first meeting, long ago in London, she had seemed to need his protection while warning him not to offer it: arrogant and absurd she had been and had remained: she had warded off friendship and stayed lonely and made such fortifications within her own mind that the truth could not pierce it. At the slightest air of censure in the world about her, up had gone the barricades, the strenuous resistance begun by which she had preserved in her own imagination, beautiful, clever, successful and beloved.”
9:30 am
While writing this review I feel some guilt…going back over passages in the book and thinking whether it really merits just a 3.45. Given I like Elizabeth Taylor’s oeuvre and know that she is a relatively obscure author who I think merits a wider audience today, I am going to bump it up to 4 stars. After all, I did say that while I had reached a point where I did not want to finish it, soon after that I once again liked it. I think this book will say in my head for a while.
Now I am satisfied. 😊
Reviews: this review is not to be missed, he really hits the mark!: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/a...
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/bo...
https://www.theguardian.com/books/boo...
Taken in its totality and after sleeping over this, I would rate this as 3.45 ( 😊 ) rounded down to 3 stars. Initially it started out quite good, then it started becoming absurd, then super-absurd, and with 91 pages to go if this had been my first read of Elizabeth Taylor I might have not finished it. But I have read six of her novels and so I was determined to see it through. Actually the last 91 pages were quite good. I took 3 pages of notes…writing down words I did not understand, writing down what I thought were key points that I did not want to forget, noting at points where things were absurd, and noting some humorous lines from protagonists.
Words I did not understand that I had to look up: vitiate (to corrupt morally; invalidate); facetious (witty, jocular); pettifogulising (pettifogging: placing undue emphasis on petty details NOTE: I could not find the word ‘pettifogulising in the OED); cosseting.
She had this phrase: “…cosseting herself away from the truth” but in the OED it means “pampering, petting, fondling”…so I still don’t get it ☹
Major protagonists:
Angel (Angelica); Mrs. Deverell (her mother); Aunt Lottie (her aunt); Theo Gilbright (her publisher); Esme Howe-Nevinson (a mediocre artists who is a total loser who she eventually ends up marrying: Nora Howe-Nevinson (Esme’s sister who is well-to-do but has no self-confidence and ends up sort of being Angel’s maid soon after she meets Angel…like for 30 years); Marvell (later in life, Angel and Esme’s servant-chauffer).
Synopsis with attempts to refrain from spoilers: Angel who is poor and 15, lives above a grocery store with her mother, and drops out of school, and begins to write a novel (she fancies herself a writer) and after two attempts gets it published…non-intellectuals love it and she continues to write more and more novels building up a faithful following, moves into more luxurious surroundings and lives extravagantly, and says whatever she wants to say to others without caring if feelings are hurt…falls in love with Esme although he does not fall in love with her right away…but somehow some way they do get married later on…and Nora ends up keeping up Angel’s mansion. Then World War I comes upon them and the book ends circa end or after World War II. Lots of years elapse…most of the telling of the tale is between 1900 and 1918 I would say.
Lines I thought were funny:
• Esme is talking to one of Angel’s friends who is an ardent vegetarian and anti-vivisectionist and talking about slaughterhouses: Her: “If we had to do it ourselves, or even be present when it was done, there would not be one of us who was not a vegetarian.” Esme: “And poor little beans, too, shredded to bits and dropped into boiling water.”
• I never heard of this often-used phrase being used in quite this way: “It was the burden of her conversation, that Madam’s death had been propitious indeed: all the same, she dwelt on the picture of her revolving in her grave at the sorry decline of the old home.”
Halfway through the book I write down this comment to myself: She reminds me of Trump!!! You can make of that what you will. 😊
There were two points in the book in which Angel’s persona was nicely encapsulated (and it was good writing):
• Perspective from a newspaper reporter who had studied up on her and knew some of her past life: “Perhaps she saw nothing as it was, everything as it should be, though doubtless never had been; thought she retained whatever her hands had once touched: fame, love , money. Like a fortune-teller in reverse, he knew what she had been, and could tell what she had had by her assumption that it was all there still…”
• From her publisher, Theo: “He had always been glad to get away from Angel; she tired and exasperated him; but he had never been able to replace his first impression of her with any other. At that first meeting, long ago in London, she had seemed to need his protection while warning him not to offer it: arrogant and absurd she had been and had remained: she had warded off friendship and stayed lonely and made such fortifications within her own mind that the truth could not pierce it. At the slightest air of censure in the world about her, up had gone the barricades, the strenuous resistance begun by which she had preserved in her own imagination, beautiful, clever, successful and beloved.”
9:30 am
While writing this review I feel some guilt…going back over passages in the book and thinking whether it really merits just a 3.45. Given I like Elizabeth Taylor’s oeuvre and know that she is a relatively obscure author who I think merits a wider audience today, I am going to bump it up to 4 stars. After all, I did say that while I had reached a point where I did not want to finish it, soon after that I once again liked it. I think this book will say in my head for a while.
Now I am satisfied. 😊
Reviews: this review is not to be missed, he really hits the mark!: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/a...
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/bo...
https://www.theguardian.com/books/boo...
December 7, 2014
4.5 stars
In A Room of One's Own (1928), Virginia Woolf described the emerging woman writer of the 20th century as theoretically confined to writing in her drawing-room - sometimes secretively, hampered literarily by patriarchy and hindered creatively by her inexperience of the world.
Elizabeth Taylor (1912-1975), whose own literary work had been influenced by Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen and E.M.Forster, would model a version of the 20th century woman writer with her offbeat protagonist Angelica Deverell -Angel. Circa 1900, Angel would write her first romantic novel in the privacy of her bedroom, march off alone to London (without the prerequisite five hundred pounds a year), refuse outrightly to make any manuscript alterations, disregarding the advice of Gilbright & Brace, to become published by the young age of sixteen years.
Her melodramatic, flamboyant romance novels, set amongst the high society of dukes and duchesses, are deemed laughable by the critics, yet become successful - widely read albeit by the lower -middle classes for whom Angel shows disdain and disrespect: the same class of her origins which she subconsciously pushes aside, too full of pride to acknowledge. Angel is an absurd, ridiculous and badly talented version of Jane Austen- the antithesis really of Virginia Woolf's vision of the 20th century woman writer.
She possesses a grandiose (perhaps delusional) imagination wrapped around an even grander ego; a humorless nature, a complete lack of self-awareness, frequent occasions for prejudiced points of view and an assertive, demanding, imposing will. Her career rockets, she becomes rich and famous; but between the changes that two wars bring and her incapacity to change with it, Angel eventually falls embarrassingly out of popularity from her once-loyal readership.
The book insert for Angel describes her as a 'monster'; her publisher Theo also ruminates: Once he saw a large cactus-plant in a flower shop window..It looked solitary and incongruous, a freakish accident; and he was reminded of Angel. (77) I tend to see her in a more sympathetic light.
Angel is class- conscious because of her poor beginnings: since adolescence, she had longed for the elevation of social prestige. Above all, she desires love much like the stuff of her novels. Isolated in her own made-up "reality", Angel actually believes she has found these things in the success of her books, her extravagant purchases and garish lifestyle; in her marriage to the good -for -nothing, femininely featured Esmé, and even in her androgynously featured sister-in-law, Nora, whom Esmé alludes to be devotedly in love with her.
With glimpses here and there of a vulnerability veiled in the stiffness of an attitude sometimes misread, Angel seems a pitiable character rather than a pathetic, unlikable one. Towards the end, like her few friends, the reader feels sad for the woman writer as if she were a character from a Shakespearian tragedy.
Virginia Woolf fans who have read her feminine discourse A Room of One's Own might note Woolf's female paradigm incandescently recreated and molded here by Elizabeth Taylor - a new favorite woman writer for me.
Angel is a loosely historical novel in that it is based on the career of best selling author Marie Corelli: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Co...
I was so intrigued by Angel that I'm sure I will be digging up some of Marie Corelli's novels -I think I'm in for some light reading and a chuckle.
In A Room of One's Own (1928), Virginia Woolf described the emerging woman writer of the 20th century as theoretically confined to writing in her drawing-room - sometimes secretively, hampered literarily by patriarchy and hindered creatively by her inexperience of the world.
Elizabeth Taylor (1912-1975), whose own literary work had been influenced by Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen and E.M.Forster, would model a version of the 20th century woman writer with her offbeat protagonist Angelica Deverell -Angel. Circa 1900, Angel would write her first romantic novel in the privacy of her bedroom, march off alone to London (without the prerequisite five hundred pounds a year), refuse outrightly to make any manuscript alterations, disregarding the advice of Gilbright & Brace, to become published by the young age of sixteen years.
Her melodramatic, flamboyant romance novels, set amongst the high society of dukes and duchesses, are deemed laughable by the critics, yet become successful - widely read albeit by the lower -middle classes for whom Angel shows disdain and disrespect: the same class of her origins which she subconsciously pushes aside, too full of pride to acknowledge. Angel is an absurd, ridiculous and badly talented version of Jane Austen- the antithesis really of Virginia Woolf's vision of the 20th century woman writer.
Her vanity had been stunned by the way in which her book had been received. No trumpets have been thrusting out from behind clouds, proclaiming 'genius' and 'masterpiece'. For a long time nothing at all had happened, and then, slowly, the abuse and sarcasm had begun. The very passages of which she had been most proud, had been printed as if they were richly humorous; her dialogue, her syntax, her view of life, her descriptions of society were all seen to be part of some new and quite delicious joke.(69)
She possesses a grandiose (perhaps delusional) imagination wrapped around an even grander ego; a humorless nature, a complete lack of self-awareness, frequent occasions for prejudiced points of view and an assertive, demanding, imposing will. Her career rockets, she becomes rich and famous; but between the changes that two wars bring and her incapacity to change with it, Angel eventually falls embarrassingly out of popularity from her once-loyal readership.
The book insert for Angel describes her as a 'monster'; her publisher Theo also ruminates: Once he saw a large cactus-plant in a flower shop window..It looked solitary and incongruous, a freakish accident; and he was reminded of Angel. (77) I tend to see her in a more sympathetic light.
Angel is class- conscious because of her poor beginnings: since adolescence, she had longed for the elevation of social prestige. Above all, she desires love much like the stuff of her novels. Isolated in her own made-up "reality", Angel actually believes she has found these things in the success of her books, her extravagant purchases and garish lifestyle; in her marriage to the good -for -nothing, femininely featured Esmé, and even in her androgynously featured sister-in-law, Nora, whom Esmé alludes to be devotedly in love with her.
She turned her back to him, examining the cactus plant again, afraid for herself lest the house, just like another childish toy, was to be the sum of her good luck.
"I comfort myself with material things," she said in a muffled voice, her long fingers pressed to her brow, covering her eyes. He knew then that she was about to risk everything and see what he himself would now have no need to say.
"What other things do you want?" he asked gently.
" Love." The word came with such a gasp that the St . Bernard for the first time looked surprised. (150)
With glimpses here and there of a vulnerability veiled in the stiffness of an attitude sometimes misread, Angel seems a pitiable character rather than a pathetic, unlikable one. Towards the end, like her few friends, the reader feels sad for the woman writer as if she were a character from a Shakespearian tragedy.
Arrogant and absurd she had been and had remained: she had warded off friendship and stayed lonely and made such fortifications within her own mind that the truth could not pierce it. At the slightest air of censure in the world about her, up had gone the barricades, the strenuous resistance begun by which she was preserved in her own imagination, beautiful, clever, successful and beloved.(226)
Virginia Woolf fans who have read her feminine discourse A Room of One's Own might note Woolf's female paradigm incandescently recreated and molded here by Elizabeth Taylor - a new favorite woman writer for me.
Angel is a loosely historical novel in that it is based on the career of best selling author Marie Corelli: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Co...
I was so intrigued by Angel that I'm sure I will be digging up some of Marie Corelli's novels -I think I'm in for some light reading and a chuckle.
October 6, 2014
No, not that Elizabeth Taylor – she of the ostentatious makeup and jewelry; that many-times-married friend of Michael Jackson. Perhaps you haven’t even heard of English novelist Elizabeth Taylor? Born in my current hometown of Reading, Berkshire, she lived from 1912 to 1975 and worked as a librarian and governess before marrying and turning to fiction. She wrote 12 novels and four books of short stories (many published in the New Yorker), collected in one volume by Virago Press in 2012.
The London Times calls her work “extremely funny, incisive, sympathetic and beautifully written...it can also make us squirm with uneasy recognition...wicked and subversive.” In an appreciation article in the Guardian, Charlotte Mendelson calls her a “writer’s writer” and likens her to Elizabeth Bowen, Anne Tyler and even Jane Austen. She’s also been championed by Hilary Mantel and Sarah Waters. So why haven’t you heard of her?
Mendelson suggests several reasons why Taylor has been underrated in the nearly four decades since her death. One, alas, is her name – everyone thinks of that other Ms. Taylor. Also, her titles can be unusual – somewhat forgettable, or making references that most people won’t get nowadays. For example: In a Summer Season, A Wreath of Roses and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont. A final problem Mendelson proposes relates to women’s fiction generally: it is often confined to the domestic sphere, which means it is considered to be of lesser importance than male literary fiction.
I hadn’t read anything by Taylor until 2012, when Angel (1957) was a preliminary selection for my work book club. It takes place in a fictionalized version of Reading town center, which Taylor calls Norley. Angelica Deverell, known as Angel, was named after the little girl at the manor where her aunt is in service. From the start she has a desperate yearning to escape her class, refusing to work as a maid and spurning her upbringing. After she and her mother move up in the world and out to the country, they never speak to their old neighbors again.
Angel becomes a successful novelist while she’s still a teenager; she has such an overblown style that her teachers think she’s plagiarized one of the Victorians, maybe Oscar Wilde or Walter Pater. She writes raunchy historical romances set in ancient Greece or in Russia (that one sounds like Dr. Zhivago). Angel’s novels become favorite victims of the critics’ barbs. Even in her own publishing house she is a figure of fun, yet she has no sense of humor; she takes herself and her work utterly seriously. All along Taylor is making it clear that quality and profit do not go hand-in-hand in the literary world.
Later portions of the novel are taken up with Angel’s relationship with her husband Esmé. She is only able to maintain the pretense that their marriage is perfect because he dies young , after losing a leg in the Second World War. Decades later she finds a letter revealing that he spent his wartime leave periods with a mistress. Angel never allows herself to grieve this betrayal, but just throws herself back into her work.
Angel is kinder to animals than she ever is to the humans in her life – taking up vegetarianism, for instance. The novel’s supporting characters are all rather pathetic: Angel’s mother is totally taken for granted; and Nora, Angel’s friend and later sister-in-law, virtually becomes her maid. One day Angel is able to buy “Paradise House,” the mansion she’s admired from afar as a little girl – just as Dickens did with his Gad’s Hill home in Kent. She becomes ensconced there, like Miss Havisham does in his Great Expectations, obsessed with a long-gone love affair.
I would have liked to spend more time with the young Angel, that precocious fifteen-year-old novelist. The book becomes much less interesting as the years go by. What I will probably remember most from it are those hints of Dickens and of D.H. Lawrence: the theme of escaping the lower class echoes his Sons and Lovers, and having a cripple for a husband is one element of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Mendelson offers this tribute to Taylor’s lasting importance in the literary canon: “There is hope, because her characters are real; they live real lives. And they suffer...Their lives are full of drama invisible to other eyes. Finding the extraordinary detail that illuminates a superficially ordinary life is harder than it looks.”
(Article originally published at Bookkaholic.)
The London Times calls her work “extremely funny, incisive, sympathetic and beautifully written...it can also make us squirm with uneasy recognition...wicked and subversive.” In an appreciation article in the Guardian, Charlotte Mendelson calls her a “writer’s writer” and likens her to Elizabeth Bowen, Anne Tyler and even Jane Austen. She’s also been championed by Hilary Mantel and Sarah Waters. So why haven’t you heard of her?
Mendelson suggests several reasons why Taylor has been underrated in the nearly four decades since her death. One, alas, is her name – everyone thinks of that other Ms. Taylor. Also, her titles can be unusual – somewhat forgettable, or making references that most people won’t get nowadays. For example: In a Summer Season, A Wreath of Roses and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont. A final problem Mendelson proposes relates to women’s fiction generally: it is often confined to the domestic sphere, which means it is considered to be of lesser importance than male literary fiction.
I hadn’t read anything by Taylor until 2012, when Angel (1957) was a preliminary selection for my work book club. It takes place in a fictionalized version of Reading town center, which Taylor calls Norley. Angelica Deverell, known as Angel, was named after the little girl at the manor where her aunt is in service. From the start she has a desperate yearning to escape her class, refusing to work as a maid and spurning her upbringing. After she and her mother move up in the world and out to the country, they never speak to their old neighbors again.
Angel becomes a successful novelist while she’s still a teenager; she has such an overblown style that her teachers think she’s plagiarized one of the Victorians, maybe Oscar Wilde or Walter Pater. She writes raunchy historical romances set in ancient Greece or in Russia (that one sounds like Dr. Zhivago). Angel’s novels become favorite victims of the critics’ barbs. Even in her own publishing house she is a figure of fun, yet she has no sense of humor; she takes herself and her work utterly seriously. All along Taylor is making it clear that quality and profit do not go hand-in-hand in the literary world.
Later portions of the novel are taken up with Angel’s relationship with her husband Esmé. She is only able to maintain the pretense that their marriage is perfect because he dies young , after losing a leg in the Second World War. Decades later she finds a letter revealing that he spent his wartime leave periods with a mistress. Angel never allows herself to grieve this betrayal, but just throws herself back into her work.
Angel is kinder to animals than she ever is to the humans in her life – taking up vegetarianism, for instance. The novel’s supporting characters are all rather pathetic: Angel’s mother is totally taken for granted; and Nora, Angel’s friend and later sister-in-law, virtually becomes her maid. One day Angel is able to buy “Paradise House,” the mansion she’s admired from afar as a little girl – just as Dickens did with his Gad’s Hill home in Kent. She becomes ensconced there, like Miss Havisham does in his Great Expectations, obsessed with a long-gone love affair.
I would have liked to spend more time with the young Angel, that precocious fifteen-year-old novelist. The book becomes much less interesting as the years go by. What I will probably remember most from it are those hints of Dickens and of D.H. Lawrence: the theme of escaping the lower class echoes his Sons and Lovers, and having a cripple for a husband is one element of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Mendelson offers this tribute to Taylor’s lasting importance in the literary canon: “There is hope, because her characters are real; they live real lives. And they suffer...Their lives are full of drama invisible to other eyes. Finding the extraordinary detail that illuminates a superficially ordinary life is harder than it looks.”
(Article originally published at Bookkaholic.)
February 5, 2023
We first meet Angel Deverell as an impetuous 15-year-old who has decided to leave school, convinced the book she’s impulsively started writing – her ‘masterpiece’ – will be a huge success. She’s right, but nothing is as she hopes. Angel’s writing becomes famous because it’s bad, and her books sell because they’re sensational trash. We follow her throughout life as she makes a series of terrible choices: squandering her money, marrying louche wastrel Esmé, buying a now-dilapidated house she had admired as a child. Angel, who is portrayed as entirely humourless, can be read as a pathetic character, but there is also something triumphant about her ability to persist in the face of criticism, indifference and ridicule. Her imagination and lack of self-awareness insulate her from the pain that others might feel in her position. Even her situation at the very end of the book is not as tragic as it might be, and there’s a certain romance to her eventual circumstances. Taylor writes with a compassion that blunts the worst blows.
February 20, 2019
Published in 1957 Angel is Elizabeth Taylor's seventh novel.
It tells the life story of fifteen year old Angel Deverell, who decides to drop out of school to write her first novel 'The Lady Irania'.Rubbished by critics the book sells really well and soon Angel is leaving her home town with her mother and buying her own home in the country.
Angel is any thing but an angel and treats people terribly.Even at a young age she is a true narcissist in the making and will stop at nothing to get what she wants.
There are some wonderful characters in this novel and the main character Angel is one you won't forget in a hurry!
It tells the life story of fifteen year old Angel Deverell, who decides to drop out of school to write her first novel 'The Lady Irania'.Rubbished by critics the book sells really well and soon Angel is leaving her home town with her mother and buying her own home in the country.
Angel is any thing but an angel and treats people terribly.Even at a young age she is a true narcissist in the making and will stop at nothing to get what she wants.
There are some wonderful characters in this novel and the main character Angel is one you won't forget in a hurry!
September 5, 2021
A headstrong and unrestrained child turns into a willfully uneducated, unrepentant, famous lady novelist. The story covers the end of the 1800s through the second world war. Angel is lonely and demanding; she collects a small cadre of loyal companions and servants and one caddish husband. The writing is both biting and funny and even though Angel is described on the back cover of this book as a monster, she is able to garner at least some of our sympathy. I loved this!
March 1, 2023
I can’t recall the last time I picked up a novel knowing nothing of it, familiar with only a very little of its author’s work, and became so completely enamoured. The writing is marvelous, lodged firmly in darkly hilarious satire, but never encaged by form; the hard shell of irony breaks open to allow an all too human story light up the pages like fire.
Angelica Deverell is called Angel since birth (a nod to her social status as opposed to that of her namesake, the daughter of the wealthy family Angel’s Aunt Lottie works for as a lady’s maid – that Angelica’s name is never shortened). Angel lives on the grim Volunteer Street in a small, overstuffed and under heated flat over a dingy neighbourhood shop run by her mother (a wedge of cheese on the counter is “covered in dirty fingerprints”, the floor scuffed, the stairs leading up to the flat lined with “casks of vinegar and jars of pickles”). From very young, Angel knows this is not where she belongs, treating her unexceptional surroundings – school, home, mother - as a temporary error.
Angel’s mother is such a shadowy presence that I’m not sure we ever learn her full name; though her marriage lasted only 2 years, she’s always referred to as Mrs. Deverell. Her daughter is a mystery out of Mrs. Deverell’s limited depths. She’s much more comfortable with her sister Lottie; they’re both women who accept their place in life as server or servant. The vast estate that employs Aunt Lottie is called Paradise House, and the tales of opulence Lottie murmurs so reverently over tea become the seeds to Angel’s vision of her future. She dreams of a life straight out of, say, a historical romance novel, increasingly the life she craves for herself and believes she can attain through the act of writing it. She’s so headstrong that she actually makes this happen. Unable to imagine failure, Angel escapes her drab existence by successfully publishing bestselling novels, garish, sprawling sagas replete with grand palaces amidst vast rose gardens and private stables, glittering sapphire tiaras and velvet fur lined capes to be ripped off by a lascivious Lord or a seductive servant.
See how easy it is to tumble down the well of Romance Language? The brilliance of this novel is in its layering; Taylor, while skewering the publishing business (the dialogue between Angel's publisher and editor is delicious), clearly has fun slipping into the style of the lush drivel turned out by her lead character. She also deftly flips everything on its head by exposing Angel as a woman so stilted, awkward and lonely that painful reality lands with a thump in the room where just a moment ago we were all laughing at the woman's dimwittedness. The back and forth for the reader is then replicated in Angel’s own experience of herself: her romance novels bring riches and notoriety, but with the social manners of a feral child, she remains friendless due to her unbearable pretension, selfishness and narcissism (when she loses her closest family member, she barely blinks emotionally, though is glad to have an excuse for dramatic black clothing). She is a fool who takes herself completely seriously, adamant that critics are missing her genius. Angel may appear aloof but her interior life is increasingly desperate. We find her pathetic yet also capable of inspiring genuine pathos.
The novel covers all of Angel's life, without one unnecessary word or moment. The strength of the story telling never falters, slowing only occasionally to pull back the lens and permit Taylor's formidable powers of description detail the English countryside, beautifully written and as far from a romance novel's fanciful broad strokes as could be. A paragraph or so later, we are back in the whirlwind and mess of Angel's terrain. When Angel falls in love with the wrong person, as inevitably she must, the object of her obsession seems at first to be exactly the sort of lout who throws heartbroken maidens aside as he saunters through her novels. He's more complex than that, and longer lasting. Longer lasting still is the presence of his sister Nora, stuck to Angel's side for better or worse (the worse will thrill fans of Grey Gardens).
I cannot recommend this book enough – nor have I done it anything like the justice it deserves – but must add that in addition to being left dazzled by the writing, Angel hit me as a perfect book for these times; the rise of a writer who doesn’t read, who holds zero respect for other authors, or, indeed, readers who would read anything but her own books; who writes without any knowledge of the settings she chooses for her ‘historical’ romantic fantasies, making numerous, embarrassing mistakes page after page (she blithely makes up French and Italian phrases, has a bottle of champagne opened by a butler wielding a screwdriver, casually changes the setting of Edwardian England to Ancient Greece, renaming her Lord Rawley Demetrious, substituting Greek slaves for British butlers, Surrey’s evergreen trees with “silvery olive groves” … (Nambia, anyone?). She cannot understand why the critics laugh at her, when the public clearly adores her. Stubbornly she lurches forward, certain that the rest of the world will follow or forever regret their inability to recognize what they could have had in Angelica Deverell.
Angelica Deverell is called Angel since birth (a nod to her social status as opposed to that of her namesake, the daughter of the wealthy family Angel’s Aunt Lottie works for as a lady’s maid – that Angelica’s name is never shortened). Angel lives on the grim Volunteer Street in a small, overstuffed and under heated flat over a dingy neighbourhood shop run by her mother (a wedge of cheese on the counter is “covered in dirty fingerprints”, the floor scuffed, the stairs leading up to the flat lined with “casks of vinegar and jars of pickles”). From very young, Angel knows this is not where she belongs, treating her unexceptional surroundings – school, home, mother - as a temporary error.
Angel’s mother is such a shadowy presence that I’m not sure we ever learn her full name; though her marriage lasted only 2 years, she’s always referred to as Mrs. Deverell. Her daughter is a mystery out of Mrs. Deverell’s limited depths. She’s much more comfortable with her sister Lottie; they’re both women who accept their place in life as server or servant. The vast estate that employs Aunt Lottie is called Paradise House, and the tales of opulence Lottie murmurs so reverently over tea become the seeds to Angel’s vision of her future. She dreams of a life straight out of, say, a historical romance novel, increasingly the life she craves for herself and believes she can attain through the act of writing it. She’s so headstrong that she actually makes this happen. Unable to imagine failure, Angel escapes her drab existence by successfully publishing bestselling novels, garish, sprawling sagas replete with grand palaces amidst vast rose gardens and private stables, glittering sapphire tiaras and velvet fur lined capes to be ripped off by a lascivious Lord or a seductive servant.
See how easy it is to tumble down the well of Romance Language? The brilliance of this novel is in its layering; Taylor, while skewering the publishing business (the dialogue between Angel's publisher and editor is delicious), clearly has fun slipping into the style of the lush drivel turned out by her lead character. She also deftly flips everything on its head by exposing Angel as a woman so stilted, awkward and lonely that painful reality lands with a thump in the room where just a moment ago we were all laughing at the woman's dimwittedness. The back and forth for the reader is then replicated in Angel’s own experience of herself: her romance novels bring riches and notoriety, but with the social manners of a feral child, she remains friendless due to her unbearable pretension, selfishness and narcissism (when she loses her closest family member, she barely blinks emotionally, though is glad to have an excuse for dramatic black clothing). She is a fool who takes herself completely seriously, adamant that critics are missing her genius. Angel may appear aloof but her interior life is increasingly desperate. We find her pathetic yet also capable of inspiring genuine pathos.
The novel covers all of Angel's life, without one unnecessary word or moment. The strength of the story telling never falters, slowing only occasionally to pull back the lens and permit Taylor's formidable powers of description detail the English countryside, beautifully written and as far from a romance novel's fanciful broad strokes as could be. A paragraph or so later, we are back in the whirlwind and mess of Angel's terrain. When Angel falls in love with the wrong person, as inevitably she must, the object of her obsession seems at first to be exactly the sort of lout who throws heartbroken maidens aside as he saunters through her novels. He's more complex than that, and longer lasting. Longer lasting still is the presence of his sister Nora, stuck to Angel's side for better or worse (the worse will thrill fans of Grey Gardens).
I cannot recommend this book enough – nor have I done it anything like the justice it deserves – but must add that in addition to being left dazzled by the writing, Angel hit me as a perfect book for these times; the rise of a writer who doesn’t read, who holds zero respect for other authors, or, indeed, readers who would read anything but her own books; who writes without any knowledge of the settings she chooses for her ‘historical’ romantic fantasies, making numerous, embarrassing mistakes page after page (she blithely makes up French and Italian phrases, has a bottle of champagne opened by a butler wielding a screwdriver, casually changes the setting of Edwardian England to Ancient Greece, renaming her Lord Rawley Demetrious, substituting Greek slaves for British butlers, Surrey’s evergreen trees with “silvery olive groves” … (Nambia, anyone?). She cannot understand why the critics laugh at her, when the public clearly adores her. Stubbornly she lurches forward, certain that the rest of the world will follow or forever regret their inability to recognize what they could have had in Angelica Deverell.
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