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I found this an odd book with an odd protagonist, though its oddness is not what left me unsure of what it all 'meant'. I don't usually go looking for meaning, but I thought maybe I should and then I glanced at the ratings of my GR friends who've read this and wondered why my reaction was different from theirs.

Angel's main, unchanging trait is her unrealistic view of the real world. From the first time we see her, she is living in her head. Because it is the Edwardian age, I suppose, she is shunned by her community, and even her mother, who feels a deep shame when one of Angel's stories (falsehoods) comes to light. This downfall precipitates her rise. Her wants, at first, are few; but they are big, and the novel details how she achieves them and what happens afterward. Those who take care of her (her publisher, her companion, an old servant) take care to keep her sheltered within her unreal world as it is what fuels her florid fiction (as well as its accompanying alliteration). At least that is the cynical view, as her enablers are all good people.

Though Angel couldn't be more different from her creator as to the fiction she produces, Angel's process would be the process of just about any writer, I would think. So I wonder if that's what this book means: that no matter what one writes, or creates (there's a painter in this book too), for it to 'become' something in the world, even if it's what some of us might term "poorly written trash", the writer has to have been immersed in her own imaginative world to the detriment of the so-called real world.

There's an important character in this book named Esmé, and because I'm an American, I knew this name first from reading Salinger, yet Salinger's character is female, though I see from the internet it was originally a masculine name (of course it was) and means 'loved', so that fits. A later minor character in this novel uses the word feminine in reference to this Esmé, so there's that too. And then I came across the word squalor and thought: huh, surely that's not a coincidence but an homage. And then, and then! after writing this review and then rereading Tony's review, which I'd totally forgotten, thinking I'd discovered this volume first out of all my GR friends (yeah, right, such is the sign of an aging memory), I see he'd figured it all out already: /review/show...

I also find that by this odd process of writing (though mine here is not an imaginative one as Taylor writes of) I've gotten more out of this odd novel than I originally thought.