Angie Barrett

Fictional character

Angie is Steve’s lover for approximately a year, a Cambridge student who achieves a First and plans to begin a PhD in Edinburgh. She has a teaching job in Brighton for the summer and later moves to Edinburgh (“Clear Spot”; “Graduation”).

She writes fluently and continuously. Steve discovers that she has drafted a novel, although she has discarded pages and refuses to treat all writing as material for an audience (“Negative Poetics”).

Desires, pressures and conflicts

Angie wants a shared future with Steve, initially proposing Brighton and later Edinburgh. She also wants him to recognise that relationships require commitment and that his poem is not a sufficient reason to damage their shared life.

Her conflict is between continuing to care for Steve and refusing to organise her life around his indecision. She repeatedly offers practical and emotional support but eventually ends the relationship herself.

Agency

Angie:

• refuses to abandon her Brighton commitment;
• urges Steve to seek less destructive financial solutions;
• reads and gives a rigorous account of Event/Horizon;
• ends the relationship after Steve’s evasions;
• enters a relationship with Declan and later with Rob;
• arranges a coded correspondence system through Grace;
• continues writing to Steve, alternately criticising, apologising and encouraging him.

Her statement that she has not changed her mind about ending the relationship is later complicated by her continued emotional attachment, but she does not explicitly seek reconciliation.

Voice and distinguishing features

Angie is articulate, intellectually agile and capable of matching Steve’s literary and theoretical discourse without becoming as self-dramatising. Her letters are “expressively emotional and novelistically detailed” at first, then become deliberately formal when she wants to limit intimacy. She is generally more direct and practically decisive than Steve.

Development and position at the end

Angie moves from hopeful partner to independent former lover. Her relationship with Declan ends; she then becomes Rob’s partner. Her later letters show continuing care but also a stronger insistence on boundaries. At the end, she wants friendship and asks Steve to accept her relationship with Rob. The possibility of future contact remains, but romantic reconciliation is explicitly rejected.

Knowledge and uncertainty

Angie correctly identifies Steve’s evasiveness and the poem’s role as a pretext, but her interpretations of Ginny’s intentions are not always confirmed. She suspects that Ginny is controlling Steve, a view later partly supported by Ginny’s concealments but not necessarily by every inference Angie makes.

Appears in

• Event/Horizon
  Cambridge, 1974 — astrophysics & poetry.
• Palace of Tears
  Cambridge & Berlin, 1975 — The Festival Theatre & Prenzlauer Berg.
• The Parallax View
  London & Cambridge, 1976 — archives, doubleness, and what is not said.