You may be relieved to hear that this weeks BotW is neither Fahrenheit Press book or a Christmas book – even though the title might suggest that it could be the latter. It is however the perfect book for curling up with on a sofa on a wintry afternoon.
The titular Angel is the spoilt darling of a grocery shop proprietress, who spins fantasies to her school mates about a glamorous house where her aunt is a maid. When she is found out she takes to her bed, refuses to return to school and starts to write novels. These turn out to be bestsellers – at least at first – even if they’re wildly inaccurate, far-fetched and slated by the critics. But Angel doesn’t care – she believes she is one of the world’s greatest writers and nothing and nobody is going to stand in her way.
Elizabeth Taylor (not that one) has created a monster. Angel is dreadful in every way – delusional, deceitful, ungrateful, selfish, vain and more. But you can’t stop reading about her in a sort of fascinated horror. She is oblivious to her faults and to the way that others view her and is able to sail through life in the comfortable delusion that she is clever, witty, brilliant and under-appreciated. You would never want to spend any time with any one like her in real life, but I could happily have spend hours more reading about her antics.
There are a fair few women in books who become writers as a response to straightened circumstances – often with a trusty maid in attendance. But they are almost always portrayed as gentlewomen brought low by financial troubles not of their own making. Angel is not one of these – she starts writing as a way of getting her own way – initially she’s more interested in showing her neighbours that she’s better than them. Then the money enables her to exert power over her mother, who in her attempts to allow her daughter to go further in life by scrimping and saving for a better education for her has created a stubborn tyrant who will brook no opposition. As we follow Angel through 40 plus years we see the changes in British society as it moves from the Victorian era, through two World Wars – and we see Angel rewrite her past and invent new fictions for herself – which she believes even if those around her know other wise.
Although Angel is the centre of this book we also get to see the people she uses up and spits out – her mother, her aunt, a wannabe poetess, her husband, her servants – and the people who manage to survive her onslaught – only really her publisher and his wife. It’s a portrait of a tyrant and it’s very, very good.
My copy of Angel is a lovely Virago Designer Hardback which I got second hand and seem to be quite hard to come by, but it’s also available in paperback from Amazon, Foyles and Waterstones and on Kindle and Kobo. And as it was first published in 1957, you have a fighting chance of being able to find yourself a second hand copy in a charity or second hand bookshop.
Happy reading.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 