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!


For Angel's 16th birthday, her aunt obtains an invitation for her to visit the big house, which she has seen only in her daydreams. She will be able to watch a dress rehearsal, but will have to sit with the maids. Angel refuses: if she can’t go in style she won’t go at all. She doesn’t want to be humiliated by going as a servant’s niece; she doesn’t want to endure seeing the mistress of the house and her daughter in possession of everything that Angel wants for herself.

This attitude is yet another red flag. When people like Angel realise that others don’t feel the same way, they rarely ask themselves why. They just despise the other people for not having any pride, standards or ambition.

Angel finishes her book and sends it off to a publisher. Her lifeline, her one means of escape, is at stake here.  She worries that some postman might throw the package away out of malice, or the train might catch fire.

She gets very angry when her book is rejected: how dare they not do what she wanted; how dare they stand in the way of the fame and fortune she deserves. She takes revenge on the publisher by starting to write a second novel, one in which an actress is first booed then worshipped. Compensation once again.

Angel’s aunt visits again, this time bringing the offer of a position for Angel at the big house – as a servant. They want to train her as a lady’s maid, so she can attend the young daughter of the house, someone she has always envied.

Her aunt couldn’t have come up with something more guaranteed to infuriate Angel. She has always wanted to get into the big house, but not on those terms. She wants bread and is being offered a stone. What an insult to the future great author! Such people expect others to treat them on the basis of their sensed potential and the idealised image they hold of themselves.

Angel’s loud, contemptuous outburst intimidates her mother and aunt, who had only passed on something that looks like a good offer. In fairness to Angel, she is living in suspense, waiting to hear from another publisher.

Angel has a very bad moment where she feels all alone with no hope. This low point, when someone feels trapped in a very bad place with no hope of improvement and no way out, is very dangerous. It is where people can sell their souls without even realising that they have done so.

Angel’s efforts to gain recognition soon pay off. After a few setbacks and rejections, she sells her first manuscript.

She goes on to make a big name and a lot of money for herself and become a gold-mine for her publishers.

A summary of Angel’s later life

The rest of the book contains more of the same arrogant attitudes and bad behaviour, much more.

It is all very depressing, painful and infuriating to read. Angel is her own worst enemy. She has the makings of a very good life but she wastes all her chances and resources because of her personal deficiencies, including selfishness, delusions, refusal to change and adapt and lack of introspection and awareness.

She does not develop or learn from experience, and she makes everyone close to her suffer. Most of her many pets do not thrive either.

Everything eventually turns sour and she ends up ill and impoverished in decaying surroundings. Then she dies.

More about Angel’s life and works

Her books sell very well, at least for a while, not because they are good but because they appeal to two very different levels of society. They are gobbled up by unsophisticated people who think they are getting a realistic picture of what life among the aristocracy is like, and they are devoured by the sophisticated classes, who find all the mistakes, confusions, absurdities, anachronisms etc. in her idealised and unrealistic depictions of high society and life in other countries hilarious.  Such glaring errors were known as 'howlers' in Victorian and Edwardian times, because they make people howl with laughter. Angel’s books are full of howlers.

Unlike Marie Corelli and Ouida, Angel finds someone who will marry her. She becomes infatuated and obsessed with a very attractive, weak young man called Esmé. She makes a bad choice: he is an extravagant, gambling philanderer, a wastrel and a sponger. He walks away from his debts, his entanglements and the messes he makes, leaving his sister to bear the consequences. He paints, but he is untalented.

Angel takes advantage of Esmé: he is down on his luck, depressed, and has scarcely a friend in the world. Most of his avenues have closed. There is some role reversal in the case: he is a like a damsel in distress; she rescues him. She lavishes him with gifts once they are married. When he gets into debt again, she promises to work day and night at her writing to raise money to pay off his creditors. She feels loyalty towards him; he finds her very irritating.

Angel buys the big house that she was obsessed with in childhood, but does not keep it in a good state. She ends up living in animal-caused squalor, as did Ouida in real life.

Her mother dies after some unhappy years living with Angel. Angel finds illness annoying and did not take her mother’s condition seriously. The aunt was not notified of Angel’s mother’s fatal illness in time to make one final visit; she tells Angel a few home truths and only ever sees her one more time.

Angel’s husband is badly injured in the First World War, and drowns when his wheelchair runs into a lake.

There is no longer a demand for Angel’s books: her old public has died off and her preaching on unpopular subjects in her later books deters possible new readers.

Her fortune dwindles away; her home, once her great obsession, falls into damp and disrepair. Her many cats destroy the furnishings and make the place filthy and squalid.

She becomes more and more impoverished, isolated and eccentric, dissociating and detaching herself from all the unpleasantness around her and seeing everything as it should be, not as it is. She still sees herself as the greatest novelist of her day.

Unlike Ouida but like Marie Corelli, she has a companion in her old age. She is the sister of Angel’s dead husband. The companion outlives Angel, who dies when a neglected cough becomes pneumonia.

Angel’s personality and behaviour

Angel and her behaviour can be described from the outside in modern terms.

She is delusional, out of touch with reality.

She cannot see the total picture. She is lacking in objectivity: she can’t see herself and her numerous deficiencies clearly. She doesn’t realise that while she may be a successful – but not a great or even good - writer, she is a terrible person.

She lacks the concept of being a human being among other human beings; she lacks simple human kindness.

She has no common sense; she has no sense of humour; she is arrogant and has no humility.

She very rarely shows any humanity or sincerity.

She tells lies throughout her life, partly out of wishful thinking, partly to make herself appear interesting and superior, and partly out of a kind of magical thinking whereby saying that something is true makes it true. Her fanciful imaginings about her past get more outrageous as time passes. She is occasionally tempted to tell the truth the way that ethical people may be occasionally be tempted to lie!

She doesn’t take responsibility for anything. For example, rather than blame herself for having too high or unrealistic expectations or ideas, she feels that people and places are disappointing her or letting her down by not being what she imagined or wanted them to be.

She must always be the centre of attraction, interrupting and distracting other people to get attention.

She behaves like an actress in a play, staging productions where she believes that she appears to advantage and treating people with regal condescension. People dine out for weeks on stories about her.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, she preserves an image of herself as beautiful, clever, successful and beloved and expects everyone to behave accordingly.

She does not – or cannot afford to – realise that people laugh at her. Her air of authority combined with the ridiculous clothes she wears astonish people; she mistakes their amusement for admiration. She mistakes dislike and avoidance for awe and respect.

Angel takes herself far too seriously. She cannot take even the faintest criticism, no matter how justified and constructive. Her reaction is always, “how dare they!” She feels a murderous hatred for one of her critics, and counters his attacks by taking revenge on him in her imagination.

She shows no gratitude and no appreciation for what people do for her: she either takes it as her due or as being given a stone when she wants bread. Her aunt helps to pay the fees so she can go to a private school for example; Angel feels no gratitude for this. Her aunt brings Angel treats in the form of cakes from the big house; Angel doesn’t thank her.

Angel is lazy. She does nothing to help her mother with the housekeeping and does not work in her mother’s shop. She never so much as makes her mother a cup of tea.

She is extremely selfish, ignoring her mother’s needs, wishes and long-term interests and taking her away from the only life she had ever known or wanted.

Everything is about Angel and the effect it has on her. For example, she becomes hysterical when her husband joins the army against her wishes. She behaves as if he has destroyed her. She misses him and blames him for deserting her; she is not concerned with his safety.

She is very ill-mannered, thinking that her genius excuses her from normal behaviour. She doesn’t know or doesn’t care about the bad effect that she has on people. Being dedicated, ruthless and single-minded, putting the writing before anything else is all very well and may be essential for success, but there is no need to be thoughtlessly rude.

She forces her unfortunate publisher to meet her, often very unreasonable, demands, by insisting on having her way and flying into rages.

Vain and abnormally touchy, Angel is insufferable.

She is exasperating, but people put up with a lot because of her gift for writing and her money.  Her husband’s sister, who becomes Angel’s assistant and companion, can’t afford to see her clearly or confront her.

She is a cash cow for her publisher, so he tolerates her never-ending and outrageous demands, complaints and accusations.

Why is Angel the way she is?

There is nothing in Angel’s background or early life to explain or justify her attitude and the way she behaves. There is no squalor, no ill-treatment and no real deprivation.

She has a cosy home, good food and a mother and aunt who are kind to her, although they don’t understand her. They are even proud of her superior airs. The grocery shop provides a living, although there are money worries.

True, her father died when she was a baby; such losses sometimes create an empty space inside people.

Her long-suffering publisher thinks that she is a freak of nature:

”They are never happy, these sports which ordinary, humble people throw off: they belong nowhere and are insatiable”

Signs of sincerity and humanity

Angel very occasionallly shows glimmers of sincerity, compassion and empathy.

She shows that she can be direct, truthful and simple, usually with Theo Gilchrist, her publisher, with whom she has quite a good relationship. She speaks to him honestly about her childhood. She feels sympathy for him when he is alone in his retirement.

Her mother is an inconvenient person to have around when Angel the schoolgirl is imagining herself installed as the owner of the local big house. It is a big problem deciding what to do about her mother. She can’t bring herself to have fantasies about removing her mother or killing her off, so she decides to let her mother live on as her lady’s maid!

It is yet another red flag to me when someone agonises over problems that exist only in their imagination while doing nothing about the very real problems in their life.

The fragile appearance of her future husband touches her heart. Her feelings for him open her to a faint, momentary understanding of and pity for her mother’s unhappiness caused by being uprooted in later life.

When she sees that her future husband has been eating fish & chips, it reminds her of her childhood. She has even felt a faint longing to eat them again, but of course this would not fit her idealised image of herself.

There is a scene where she looks back at her young self and her early life and tells herself in wonder and content that she has everything.

What is Angel?

Angel has been described as a monster. Her attitude and behaviour towards others could be taken as signs of a narcissist or someone with borderline personality disorder. She could be diagnosed as someone with little sense of identity whose false, inauthentic self is living at the expense of her real self.

I think that there is a lot more to it than the psychological aspects and her publisher’s opinion that she is a freak of nature.

It seems to me that she is a type; she is running a program; the things that she says and does and that happen to her are predictable, part of a scripted scenario. This scenario applies to Ouida, Marie Corelli and other historical people, some fictional characters and a few people I have met in real life.

The unseen influences at work in Angel Deverell’s life will be the subject of another article or two, including things she has in common with some of the creative people and witches I have written about.