Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel: witches and writers

Elizabeth Taylor’s novel Angel has inspired two previous articles:

Angel’s Imagination covers the ways in which a very strong, active imagination can be a liability in everyday life.

Angel’s Life and Personality describes Angel and her life mainly in modern-day, this-world terms.

Much of Angel is familiar not only because I have read the biographies of Ouida and Marie Corelli that were the source of some of the material in Elizabeth Taylor’s novel, but also because it reminds me of what I have read, and sometimes written, about other people of interest.

Angel Deverell has many characteristics and events in her life in common with both fictional witches and real-life creative writers.

Angel and some fictional witches

I had read only a few pages of the book when Diana Wynne Jones’s young witch Gwendolen Chant came to mind. They have selfishness, an abrupt manner and single-mindedness in common. Gwendolen wants to rule the world; Angel wants to dominate the world.

There is a scene in Angel where she visits her publisher at his home; she ignores his wife. This reminds me of something I quoted about C. S. Lewis’s witch Jadis in the article about Gwendolen Chant: 

“In Charn she [Jadis] had taken no notice of Polly (till the very end) because Digory was the one she wanted to make use of. Now that she had Uncle Andrew, she took no notice of Digory. I expect most witches are like that. They are not interested in things or people unless they can use them; they are terribly practical." 
The Magician’s Nephew

Both Gwendolen and Angel are quick to take offence and become furious when thwarted. Both hate to see others in possession of things they want for themselves. Both are outraged when they don’t get the recognition they think they deserve.

Neither girl is interested in academic achievement; they just concentrate on their one obsession to the exclusion of everything else, with Angel exercising her imagination and Gwendolen her magical powers.

Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel: her life and personality

Angel Deverell is the main character in Elizabeth Taylor’s novel Angel.  She has provided much more article material than I was expecting. After describing how she lives in her imagination rather than in the real world, we will now cover something of her life, personality and behaviour.

We left Angel at the point where her lies have been exposed and she escapes into illness and her imagination.

Angel Deverell becomes a romance writer

When her mother confronts her, Angel faces blankness and despair and longs for death, seeing no other way out.

When certain people feel that all avenues are closed and cry out on the inside for a miraculous deliverance, something may hear them and come to their rescue, offering what seems like a possible way out…for a price. It may even be that the avenues were deliberately closed, so that the victim chooses the path that they were intended to take all along.

Angel remembers something that for once made her feel happy: it was when she wrote an essay. She decides to write a book. It comes easily: the words flow effortlessly because she just gets some of her fantasies down on paper. Angel’s imaginings are all very visual, pictures seen in the mind’s eye. The words and narrative are not important to her.

Angel has never grieved over any human beings and doesn’t care that a neighbour’s daughter might be dying, but she cries over the funeral she writes about. Seeing real life as unreal, treating the inner world as the real world and the outer world as just a dream is yet another occupational hazard for people with very strong imaginations and unsatisfactory lives.

Angel refuses to return to school; she won’t look for work either: she disdains the suggestion that she could get an office job. She will write books and become rich and famous!

Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel: her imagination

I first heard about Elizabeth Taylor’s novel Angel when it turned up in the results of a Google Search for “Marie Corelli”. 

I had never read any of Taylor’s books, but I got a copy from my library after reading in reviews that Angel was based in part on the lives of the Victorian romance writers Marie Corelli and Ouida. I had read biographies of both of these best-selling writers and was curious to see how much of their biographical material had been used in Angel.

Much of the book is very familiar; I recognised many elements from the biographies. Angel Deverell, the main character, is obviously a composite of Marie Corelli and Ouida. Some of the descriptions of her personality, behaviour and events in her life were taken directly from the biographies.

Angel Deverell is a classic textbook case. She is a type of person who appears in the human race from time to time. I see them as a kind of witch. They may get what they wish for, but the price may be very high and it may all turn to dust and ashes.

Reading about Marie Corelli’s, Ouida’s and now Angel’s life has confirmed some of my ideas about sinister unseen influences that might be at work in people’s lives. There is a lot of material of interest in the book; it will take more than one article to cover it.

Angel Deverell and the dangers of too much imagination

We first meet Angel when she is a schoolgirl of 15. Her colouring is striking, but she is not beautiful. She is not very good at her lessons either, although she can fool people who know much less than she does into thinking that she is a good student.

The only attribute Angel has that is above average is her imagination, and she uses it all the time. It plays a much greater part in her life than her senses do. To Angel, her experiences are a makeshift substitute for her imagination.

She concentrates very hard and visualises her ideal life, one of nobility, glamour and splendour, very clearly. She daydreams whenever she can, as she dislikes the people around her and the environment she lives in. She wants, and feels entitled to, something much better.