Angel (Virago Modern Classics)
by Elizabeth Taylor
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other reviews (showing 1-20 of 52)
Read in June, 2008
Mid 20thcentury novel about the life of a horrible author of very popular quite horrible romances. I loved how it was about literature, romance literature and book fashions, the most powerful part of the book was the beginning, about writing and starting to write.
I am probably biased due to personal taste, since I am very fond of satire, I kept thinking this book would have been so much better (to me only probably) if it had been real straight satire. What I loved were precisely the over t...more
I am probably biased due to personal taste, since I am very fond of satire, I kept thinking this book would have been so much better (to me only probably) if it had been real straight satire. What I loved were precisely the over t...more
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Read in August, 2007
recommends it for:
girls with fanciful notions about their past, people who enjoy clever and subversive humor
The reason this book is good is not because Taylor employs the term 'pettifogulism', although I admit to having to look it up because I hadn’t the faintest idea what it meant. Taylor seems a little dated, but her humor is still pretty delectable. Angel is an insufferable and precocious sixteen-year-old who tells imaginative fabricated stories of a regal, but tragic family history involving Paradise House, a local castle. She is unpopular, average looking with a terribly common lineage, and une...more
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Read in March, 2008
recommended to Leonie by:
Scatz
Awful, awful girl!! Vain and selfish and lazy and arrogant... Unfortunately I see a lot of myself in her. And yet she was pitiful in her last days. Elizabeth Taylor really did excel with this excellent novel that evoked such powerful scenery and characters - I really got such a strong sense of the times that they were living in, although every so often I'd forget that Angel was female and Esme was male. I blame Tess of the D'Urbervilles! I like to imagine dear faithful Nora seeing out her days i...more
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Elizabeth Taylor has been called a cheerier Anita Brookner. Her story of Angel, the precocious and humorless young author who achieves success at the early age of 15 is oddly fascinating. Angel's substitution of the real world for the overblown, romanticized and purple prose fantasies in her own novels is both funny and sad. At times, it reminded me of Dickens' Great Expectations. Ultimately, the story made me a little depressed so I can't give it more than three stars. I might still give Taylor...more
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Read in October, 2007
recommends it for:
fans of Northanger Abbey
Shrewd, lovely, precisely observed, perfectly paced satire of a sensationalist Edwardian novelist - an old-fashioned V. C. Andrews. The character portrayals are fun, but Taylor really excels at the descriptions, which are economical, vivid, and lovely whether describing the commonplace or the wholly bizarre. There is one character, Hermione, whom I totally identify with.
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Read in January, 2008
Angel/Angelica is someone I couldn't stand five minutes with in the same room, so I'm grateful to meet her cushioned by the pages of a book. Such an impossible! character, so vividly rendered. I'm definitely going to read more Taylor.
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Read in December, 2007
recommends it for:
Any and everyone
This was amazing, a curious hybrid of EF Benson and Dawn Powell. Brilliant.
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