Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel: some miscellaneous thoughts

This final article in the series inspired by Elizabeth Taylor’s novel Angel includes some more connections and a few miscellaneous points of interest.

Angel Deverell and Esmé Scarron the sorcerer

These two people have generated many articles between them; it would be very easy to produce some more, but enough is enough!

By coincidence, Esmé is the name of Angel’s debt-ridden wastrel of a husband, but she bears more resemblance to Stella Gibbons’s villain Esmé Scarron from The Shadow of a Sorcerer than he does!

Angel shares Scarron’s arrogance and preference for having admiring followers or even worshippers rather than real friends.

She too has a bad effect on the people around her, her mother and husband in particular.

Angel could have improved her inner state and become a better person, but just like Scarron she lacks the necessary humility.

Brothers and sisters

Angel’s husband’s full name is Esmé Howe-Nevinson. He is the brother of Nora Howe-Nevinson, Angel’s companion and assistant.

It is not just Esmé’s name that has a connection to Stella Gibbons: his personality and behaviour resemble those of her younger brother Lewis.

As mentioned in the first article in the series, the novelist Marie Corelli was one of the inspirations for Angel. Corelli’s half-brother Eric was a wastrel who was always demanding money from her; Elizabeth Taylor probably created Esmé from what she knew of Eric, but he is also a classic, textbook case.

Many of us will encounter people like Esmé, who go through life leaving a trail of failures, debt and destruction behind them and who are forever taking on new initiatives without the resources and reserves to back them up. They make life hell for anyone they can get a hold over.

Both Stella and the fictional Nora kept house for their brothers;

Both Stella Gibbon’s brother Lewis and the fictional Esmé were unstable; they got into financial and other messes and left it to their sisters to sort it all out.

Same game, different players yet again.

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.