Angela McLean

Hello! It’s Angela! I live in London. I am a theatre-goer enthusiast, passionate about reading, and always desire to travel. I teach at City & Islington College; my main focus is OCR A-Level Literature and A-Level Language & Literature.

Welcome to my blog, where I share insights into mental disorders in literary protagonists, including novels, plays, poems, and short stories.

With more than twenty years of experience teaching English literature, my experience includes teaching international students, secondary schools, sixth-form colleges, and universities. Recently, my main focus has been GCSE and A Level literature.

In recent years, and especially since Covid, I have seen a significant rise in mental health issues in my students. Students (teenagers and adults) tend to connect with texts and share their personal experiences when discussing the mental disorders of protagonists.

I was born in South Wales and raised in Shropshire. I graduated from Sheffield Hallam University with a bachelor’s degree in English. I completed an MA from King’s College London in English Language Teaching & Applied Linguistics a few years later.

I started reading extensively around the age of 16.  Literature inspired a sense of wanderlust and curiosity about the world, which led me to desire to travel and experience different cultures and places. After leaving university, I spent a year in France teaching English to native French speakers. While in France, I studied literature at the university in Perpignan, where I was first introduced to detective novels. After reading The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, I was left with a passion for crime writing.

Over the years, I have enjoyed teaching texts such as The Sign of Four, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and, more recently, Atonement and In Cold Blood by Truman Capote.

I left France and spent three fascinating years teaching English in Taiwan. Here, I was introduced to the traditional beliefs of Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism.  These continue to be well represented daily, from temple celebrations, literature, and the performing arts.

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