Angel's method is to remove herself 'romantically from the evidence of her senses: the reality of what she could learn by touching, tasting, was banished as a trivial annoyance, scored out as irrelevant' - but at the same time she gives credence to Angel's own seriousness of purpose. Taylor satirises this type of romantic writing. When her stories are revealed as lies, she is too humiliated to return to school and takes to her bed to write a novel into which she pours all her wishes and aspirations. She spins stories, which she half believes, to school-friends about how, but for her mother having married beneath her, she would be living in Paradise House surrounded by horses, dogs and a flock of white peacocks. She is the type of girl (as I fear I was) whose overactive imagination makes it difficult sometimes to differentiate between reality and fantasy. Her aunt is lady's maid at Paradise House, a grand local pile that Angel dreams of occupying. But it is Angel's work and it is her ability to churn out reams of such heightened twaddle that proves her means of escape from her lowly origins - her father is dead and her mother runs a grocer's shop.

It begins with Angel, as she is always known, a dreamy and very individual 15-year-old, being suspected of plagiarism when she hands in an essay on 'A Storm at Sea' filled with phrases such as 'into the vast vacuity of the empyrean', which her teacher cannot believe is her own work. It takes the form of the life story of Angelica Deverell, a writer of overblown romantic fiction in the tradition of Ethel M Dell, perhaps, or Marie Corelli.

Angel by Elizabeth Taylor