Angel by Elizabeth Taylor

He would be glad to get away--from the cats, the fleas, the damp, and these three eccentric women.  He had always been glad to get away from Angel; she tired and exasperated him; but he had never been able to replace his first impression of her with any other.  At that first meeting, long ago in London, she had seemed to need his protection while warning him not to offer it; arrogant and absurd she had been and had remained: she had warded off friendship and stayed lonely and made such fortifications within her own mind that the truth would not pierce it.  At the slightest air of censure in the world about her, up had gone the barricades, the strenuous resistance begun by which she was preserved in her own imagination, beautiful, clever, successful and beloved.

Fifteen-year old Angel Deverill is what you might call "a handful": overly sensitive and proud, too arrogant for friends, snobbish toward her mother's position as a shopkeeper, unable to see things from anyone else's point-of-view than her own.  She decides one day to write a novel, and does, a flowery and melodramatic romance titled The Lady Irania.  Her prose and her plot are both overwrought; she doesn't read any other books herself so she doesn't know what they sound like, a habit she'll maintain for the rest of her life as a semi-successful author.  And her books are successful, from The Lady Irania; the publishers imagine that she's a little old lady sequestered in a cottage with a hundred cats.  Eventually, Angel comes to occupy that role perfectly, but at the first they are surprised when a fifteen-year old girl shows up at their door.

Though she'd never admit it, Angel's books are trashy.  Her publishers know that they're perfect for the pulp market, dominated by lower- and middle-class readers looking for escapism.  Angel, of course, never stops believing her work to be evidence of her genius, which, judging from the reviews, is unappreciated by a philistine world.  Author Elizabeth Taylor (no, not that one) never gives us any of her prose directly, but we get to hear the publisher's parody of it at a cocktail party:

Kindly raise your coruscating beard from those iridescent pages of shimmering tosh and permit your mordant thoughts to dwell for one mordant moment on us perishing in the coruscating workhouse, which is where we shall without a doubt find ourselves, among the so-called denizens of deep-fraught penury.

I love that; I recognize that in the work of some of my students, who need to develop discernment and restraint along with talent and imagination.  But Angel never grows up.  Taylor follows Angel over the whole of a life, from fifteen-year old prodigy to eccentric old woman.  Part of Angel's motivation lies in the stories she's told as a child about an estate called Paradise House, from her aunt who is a servant there.  Paradise House becomes, in Angel's imagination, an avatar of the medieval fantasies that haunt her books, a life she might have lived, and which she deserved more.  Eventually, she buys it, but Paradise House with Angel in it is never quite sufficient to her dreams.  She fills it with dogs and cats and peacocks and lets it go to filthy ruin, until it really is like something out of her novels.  And if the life is squalid, she'll never acknowledge it.

Angel is a terrific character novel.  I was truly impressed by the way that Taylor is able to make Angel seem so terribly consistent from teenagerhood to old age.  The changes are subtle and thoughtful, but that consistency is one of the flaws in Angel's character.  She's awful, really.  She has a grotesquely inflated sense of self-importance; she has no sense of irony or humor about herself or anything else.  But still Taylor makes her seems vulnerable; perspective and humor are traits that keep us safe and balanced, and missing them, Angel lives in a world that always seems on the dangerous edge of being blindsided by reality.  Somehow those traits also make her impervious.  They also make the book also very funny, in the way that people who have no idea of their own abilities or personality can be grimly funny.  Mostly, they make Angel seem breathtakingly, tragically, human.