Angel grows up, a grocer's daughter, with a monstrously inflated sense of her own talents and importance. She is lucky in those who indulge her - perhaps not so lucky in love. From the beginning of this novel we are faced with a feeling of bewilderment. What exactly to make of this fantasist who muddles her own origins and takes on those of others for aggrandisement? She writes atrociously bad novels, but a certain kind of woman loves them, though towards the end of her career and on a definite downslope, we learn that, "...only the elderly or middle-aged had ever read them." Nevertheless, she earned a certain kind of notoriety for the scandals she hinted at. Imagine, perhaps Marie Corelli laced with something a little more specific, though never physically specific.
Lucky Angel, to find a woman who is willing to sacrifice her own life-chances to serve this inflated authoress, living with her and managing her household, and lucky again to find publishers who are cynical enough to publish her output and even feel a certain patriarchal pride and protectiveness towards her. But nothing can be done for her as the inevitable decline begins. A good-natured offer of money from an old friend is rejected in outrage.
Tremendously engaging, truly appalling, righteously ridiculous, this is a story of the kind of person who, today, could barely exist. Trying to find a modern-day figure to compare to Angel, I could only think of someone like Jordan - sound business-woman producing tawdry rubbish for the mindless today, but one hesitates to think of what decline will do to all her accoutrements. This novel is a kind of satire, which is fitting and right with such an ugly subject. Brilliantly achieved satire with a touch of nostalgia for an age when women who wrote were lady writers.
