Freshly minted this past June as the new editor of Chatelaine, the country’s best-selling women’s magazine, Sara Angel is working from home this morning—home being a skinny Victorian not far from Trinity Bellwoods. It may be 8 a.m., but Angel does not work at home in jeans and a T-shirt. A self-described “hard-core girly girl,” she greets me in an ele­gantly phrased suit, her grandmother’s diamond-and-pearl brooch for punctuation, and high, but reassuringly stable, heels. She is, at 37, a mother of two, nursing one-month-old Jackson as we talk while Nita, her nanny, keeps a careful eye on rambunctious two-year-old Charles (“It’s a family name and we wanted it,” says Angel, “but we held out a long time. Charlie Angel?”).

She accepted the editor’s job at Chatelaine at a difficult time in the magazine’s 78-year history; former editor Kim Pittaway had quit in August 2005, claiming too much editorial interference from the publisher, and the city’s inbred journalism community grew alternately gleeful and despairing over the magazine’s inability to choose a replacement. Angel was a surprising pick. Her only experience in magazines had been a short stint as visual features editor at Saturday Night. I ask her if she felt intimidated. Chatelaine, after all, is a Canadian icon. “No,” she says. There is a brief pause for reflection. Then “no” again.

She has the confidence of a child of privilege (which she is), though none of the arrogance (she also calls herself “a child of retail”). Her parents, Edward and Eva Borins, ran a small chain of bookstores called Edwards Books & Art. “My job as a child,” she says, “was to bag books at the Queen Street outlet,” and she remembers, at the age of 14, being served with a summons for violating the Retail Business Holidays Act by opening on Sundays (the case ended up in the Supreme Court). She also remembers the lively intellectual atmosphere of home life—if David Hockney did a book signing at the store, he’d join the family (she has two younger brothers) for a visit. She still has a book by Gloria Steinem, inscribed “To Sara, who will one day make a better world.” She has always loved books. It may be genetic. “Charles’s first word,” she says, “was ‘book.’ For a while, he called everything he liked a book.”