Elizabeth Tayor's novel Angel and its literary antecedents

At its best, Elizabeth Taylor's novel Angel (1957) reminds us of Wharton or even Wharton's friend Henry James, a tale of a young woman who finds through her efforts and talents and in opposition to many, mostly male, disbelievers, finds worldly or artistic success (of both) but suffers for lack of love, or the ability to love, and marries the wrong guy, someone who will exploit her for her money and mistreat her throughout. That's the story of Angel, who becomes a highly successful writer of what today we would call romance novels, ridiculed by critics but not by readers, lifting her at first to wealth but she seeks more: acceptance by high society (which she doesn't attain, at least through the first half of the novel - the London "scene" invite her to many events but is put off by her coldness and eccentricities) and the love of a good man. Unfortunately for Angel, she has no capacity to a snake in the grass when she sees one. She falls in love - based on a one-hour meeting - with a would-be artist, Esme, whose aesthetic is completely opposed to hers - he paints scenes of urban and industrial squalor, which makes him somewhat avant-garde except that he's a phony and lazy and and exploiter of women in every possible way. He sees falls for Angel because of her wealth, but at about the midpoint of the novel, on their honeymoon on the Continent, it's obvious that the marriage is doomed: Angel has no interest in sex and is unable to express any love toward Esme, nor he to her. Unlike most novels w/ similar plots there's no counterpoint to Esme, no man whom Angel should love and should have accepted into her life; she's a lonely and bitter character throughout and it seems Esme is the only man she's ever known at all. At times the novel veers toward the implausible - notably in Angel's complete infatuation with this phony - but it's almost as if the novel is self-inoculated: Any time the narrative veers from probability of verisimilitude we can only reflect that it's far more credible and natural than the writings of the eponymnous Angel (Taylor gives us no more than a sample of her writing, but we get the point: ludicrous settings in an imagined Ancient Greece, e.g.).