Angel (novel)
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Angel is a novel by the English novelist Elizabeth Taylor first published in 1957.
It tells the life story of Angelica ("Angel") Deverell from her adolescence and first attempts at writing, through the course of her career as a successful writer of sensational romances, into her decline, old age and death. Although she finds fame and wealth and marries the love of her life, Angel is condemned to a life of isolation and disappointment: critics regard her work as absurd and her closest relationships—with her publisher, her husband, and her sister-in-law—are doomed by the inability of others to conform to her unrealistic view of life. Although Angel is in the main portrayed as a grotesque eccentric, she is frequently made to seem pathetic, if not tragic.
Angel is a fictional representation of the kind of temporarily popular writer of romances such as Marie Corelli, Ouida, or Ethel M. Dell. Matthew Walther argues that "the book is not really a roman à clef so much as it is a kind of horrifying anti-memoir, Taylor’s sounding of her own experience and dredging up her worst fears as a young female writer: mawkishness, philistinism, naïveté, stupidity, solipsism."[1]
Angel was reprinted by Virago Press in 1984 with a new introduction by Paul Bailey.
In 2007, Angel was turned into a movie by French director François Ozon.
Angel was the February 2012 Classics Book Club Selection at The New York Review of Books. It was published in the NYRB Classics series on February 14, 2012, with an introduction by Hilary Mantel.[2]
