During last week's discussion of Better Angel, I asked my fellow BookMen whether any of them knew from which part of the novel that title derived. (I didn't!)
Philip Clark has now ridden to the rescue with an answer:
"As mentioned last night, the 1987 Alyson edition of Better Angel (still attributed to Richard Meeker, as Forman Brown hadn't yet been identified) includes an epigraph with the book title. I don't know whether this epigraph was included in the 1933 first edition or whether Alyson added it, but I'd guess the former and that it has simply been dropped in later editions. The full epigraph is: "Two loves have I of comfort and despair / Which like two spirits do suggest me still; / My better angel is a man right fair --". The quotation is the first three lines from Shakespeare's Sonnet 144."
Thanks, Philip!
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