Angel: A Virago Modern Classic (VMC) [Paperback]

Elizabeth Taylor is one of English literature's best kept secrets; her shrewd, observant novels of human frailty have won her a small but devoted readership and 'Angel' is held by many as their favourite of her books.

Spurred on by loneliness and desperation, the young and staunchly determined Angelica Deverell draws on her own naïve perceptions of literature to produce what she thinks are masterpieces. Refusing to believe herself to be anything less than a genius, she disregards her publisher's attempts to restrain her high-flown prose and clumsy syntax and embarks on a starry career as a romantic novelist. Her books are bestsellers - despite being rubbished by critics - and Angel's uncompromisingly high view of herself is vindicated. Her success, however, spells dissatisfaction for those who tolerate her as her behaviour grows more outrageous and inconsiderate.

Elizabeth Taylor charts Angel's spectacular rise and gradual fall with a devastating eye for ironic detail. The intentions, desires and frustrations of Angelica and those around her are conveyed with the lightest touch. The fluctuating line between Angel's astounding arrogance and her unspoken terrified hopes, would, in the hands of a lesser writer have become a farce, or at the very least a satire. Taylor sees all and judges not.

The novel is moving, humane and compelling. Read it.

Apart from Andrea Camilleri, the superb Sicilian writer of boisterous crime novels, my happiest discovery in the last year or two has been the once well-known novelist Elizabeth Taylor (1912-1975). Having read the beautifully written A View Of The Harbour, I picked up Angel the other day, as it seemed about time I read another of this absurdly underrated author`s books.
What a wonderfully witty, sad, relentless and sly novel. Other reviewers on this page have given enough synopses, so I won`t rehash the plot. But in the character of Angel herself, Taylor created a genuine monster, an often heartless, egotistical, misanthropic, myopic, selfish bitch. And yet, the author being the great writer I believe she is - in the tradition of the subtler, `quieter` English novelists - she manages to persuade us, through her art, that the story of Angel is worth a 250-page novel and our time. This it most certainly is.
I got the impression, the more I read, that Taylor had had a ball writing this strange tale. She gives Angel virtually no redeeming features at all (even her much vaunted love of animals is sentimental, and a corollary to her lack of love for her own kind) but Angel`s, and the novel`s, saving grace, aside from the sheer precision of its composition, is the few chinks in her armour we are vouchsafed, such as when, later in her eccentric, deluded life, she admits she longs for a kind word. This woman incapable of love needs just that, and, against all odds, one`s heart goes out.
I have never, in fiction, met anyone quite like Angel. One can think of many monsters in novels of various kinds: Dickens`s Uriah Heep, Conan Doyle`s Charles Augustus Milverton, Iago...but they are recognisably human, however grotesque, with their vulnerabilities on show, consciously or otherwise. Angel admits no falliblity, no self-awareness at all. Somehow, Taylor manages to still make us care, and find this stern oddball of a woman worth troubling about. Yes, of course this is partly a novel about writers, publishers and critics, but I think that aspect of the story can be overplayed. This is also surely a book about some kind of rebel, if a dislikeable, surly, humourless one. Angel (and the novel itself) makes us look at the world from a rarely seen perspective, that of an unconsciously vulnerable, ultimately tragic woman - tragic to us if not to herself - whose world is centered purely on her own demands and desires. But we read on. And yes, we do care. Why? Because Taylor is such a cunning and subtle novelist, whose prose comes to be as much a character as Angel herself.
This, after all, is what all writers worth the name are able to do.
I was taken aback, depressed, impressed, saddened, amused and bemused by this unique saga, and I hope the novels of Elizabeth Taylor - in their excellently presented reissues from Virago Press - become widely read, as they most definitely deserve to be.

Angelica Deverell, otherwise known as Angel, is one of those characters you love to hate and I think Elizabeth Taylor must have had a lot of fun writing this book. Unusually for one of Taylor's novels, the story covers Angel's life from when she starts to write her first book at 15 all the way through to old age. Unlike Taylor, Angel is a terrible writer yet, also unlike Taylor, her books are remarkably popular.

This is Angel's publishers' reaction to her first book:

'Gilbright and Brace had been divided, as their readers' reports had been. Willie Brace had worn his guts thin with laughing, he said. The Lady Irania was his favourite party-piece and he mocked at his partner's defence of it in his own version of Angel's language.

"Kindly raise your coruscating beard from those iridescent pages of shimmering tosh and permit your mordant thoughts to dwell for one mordant moment on us perishing in the coruscating workhouse, which is where we shall without a doubt find ourselves, among the so-called denizens of deep-fraught penury. Ask yourself - nay, go so far as to enquire of yourself - how do we stand by such brilliant balderdash and live, nay, not only live, but exist too..."

"You overdo those 'nays'," said Theo Gilbright. "She does not."

"There's a 'nay' on every page. M'wife counted them."'

Angel's character matches her writing: she's vain, completely without empathy or humour, unable to accept any criticism or to see criticism as anything other than a personal attack, a self-proclaimed lover of animals and yet she doesn't properly care for or control the pets she owns. Angel is a bit of a monster and seems to live mostly in the world she has created inside her head.

This book is filled with dark humour so although I don't think this was Elizabeth Taylor's best novel, for me, it was certainly her funniest. As Hilary Mantel writes in the introduction of the new Virago edition of Angel (Virago Modern Classics): "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."