Angel opens with a scene of several teachers of a select girls’ school in delightful disarray. The eponymously mis-named Angel has submitted a piece of writing which her teacher would like to pillory, but not before she has checked Ruskin, Pater and Wilde, fearing to look foolish if Angel has performed an act of plagiarism with malicious intent.

Upon meeting Angelica Deverell it becomes clear that the teachers may have some justification for both their mistrust and implied dislike.

Angel is fifteen. In the very early nineteen hundreds poverty is an ever present threat, but Angel has no work ethic. Discouraged from helping her mother in the shop in an attempt to raise her above her position of grocer’s daughter, Angel has taken the lesson to heart and will not lift a finger to help her mother in any way. Angel lies and manipulates, and does not believe in reading. (Although, when pressed, she will acknowledge that Shakespeare had some talent.)

What honesty Angel possesses manifests in her writing. She discovers her work ethic. Writing passionately for herself precludes manipulation of her audience, who do not exist for Angel except in an adulatory sense.

These contradictions intrigue but never stretch belief too far. She has an imagination that allows her to create incredible over-written scenes which appeal to some as escapist fantasy and to others as the laughably absurd, (Dan Brown, anyone?!) but her empathy for others is almost non-existent, as she projects her self-interested imagination instead. Angel is not intuitively likable, but her acquaintance are inspired to respond to her with a spectrum of reactions which range from the protective to amazed fascination, with amusement and dislike somewhere in between.

It is not only the characters. The novel follows Angel to her death, which is arguably a good one. Briefly ill, Angel dies in her old age. Not a tragic end in itself, but I was surprised to find myself inclined to cry over this apparently obnoxious person.

Or I would have been surprised if it were not for lines like these…

‘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 could not pierce it.’

‘Like many romantic, narcissistic women she shied away from the final act of love-making. She would have lived in a world of courtship and hand-kissing if she could. Sex seemed to have nothing to do with her. It was a sudden reversal, not a continuation, of the delights of being wooed.’

…and the realisation that over the course of a lifetime Angel’s character has remained static, while it is the reader who changes to accommodate her.

Imagination with little empathy, and an obsessive interest in animals, are traits which can be found on the autistic spectrum. This is where the concept of the neuronovel arises. I am indebted to Kerry of Hungry Like the Woolf for highlighting this article on the ‘neuronovel.’ I believe that I am not a huge fan of the neuronovel. Flag up one or two key qualities and the character is nailed, encouraging complacency on the part of both author and reader. The neurally atypical does not appear to be automatically entitled to the level of complexity which a good author is obliged to accord his creations and which the reader should expect to decipher.

Taylor pre-dates recognition of neuronovel as a form. Lacking access to such facile classifications, it is a tribute to her skill that she created a fully realised eccentric who may, nonetheless, be recognised in the modern terms of neuroscience. Angel is simultaneously incredible but believable, endowed with the unmistakable quality of humanity which renders her death scene so moving.

This impressive novel is a detailed character study, a subtle semi-biography, with some beautifully underdeveloped minor themes. Angel’s essay which begins the book, interchangeable with Wilde? Angel’s occasional revelations of her undisclosed childhood, simple but movingly told. Finally, Angel was named after a parallel Angelica of the same age, of the upper classes… There is the tiniest hint that Angel might have been a different person, a different writer.