Angela Carter

The most difficult performance in the world is acting naturally, isn't it? Everything else is artful." 'Flesh and the Mirror', Fireworks, 1974

Angela Carter


People often ask, ‘If you could have a dinner party and invite anyone you want, real or fiction, alive or dead, who would you invite?’ I would ask just Angela Carter. I wouldn’t want to share her attentions with anyone else.

Of the forests of books I’ve read, Carter’s have moved me the most. Whether working in the format of short stories, novels, journalism or critic, her voice was singular, sensual and rife with magic. Carter wove together humor, Gothic fairy tale themes, violence, and eroticism with a profound understanding of how the deeper, darker parts of the human mind work. Some called her the high priestess of porn while Merja Makinen referred to her as the "avant-garde literary terrorist of feminism."

"A good writer can make you believe time stands still," she once said.

She was a feminist and a political beast that had stood the post-modern literary world on its proverbial head. Born in Eastbourne, Sussex, England on the May 8th 1940, she was evacuated to her officious grandmother’s working-class home in Yorkshire. The Baba Yaga that was her grandmother strongly colored the rest of Carter’s life.

"I am the pure product of an advanced, industrialized, post-imperialist country in decline,'' she wrote.

Further influenced by her mother’s love of literature, Carter grew up a voracious reader with a questioning mind. She studied English at the University of Bristol and learned to speak both French and German. This allowed her direct access to the works of de Sade, Bataille, Irigaray, de Beauvoir – all of which left strong impressions. Of de Beauvoir she said, ''Why is a nice girl like Simone (Beauvoir) wasting her time sucking up to . . . boring old . . . J.P.? (Jean-Paul Sartre).''

She even went to so far as to defend de Sade’s representation of women in THE SADEIAN WOMEN. She used the Somerset Maugham prize for Literature in a manner that she said would have pleased him – she ran away from her husband and all things British. She traveled the world and eventually remarried and semi-settled into life in at first Brown University in Rhode Island, then the University of Adelaide, South Australia and finally at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, as a part-time lecturer and resident writer. Before she succumbed in 1992 at the age of fifty-one, gave readers 27 works and with each one, the possibility of brutal insight wrapped with beautiful prose. In her obituary in The Observer Newspaper, Margaret Atwood said:

"She was the opposite of parochial. Nothing, for her, was outside the pale: she wanted to know about everything and everyone, and every place and every word. She relished life and language hugely, and reveled in the diverse."

Salman Rushdie wrote,

"English literature has lost its high sorceress, its benevolent witch queen."

SHADOW DANCE was published in 1966 and Carter instilled in this first book her exploration of sexuality in fantasy and reality. 1967’s THE MAGIC TOYSHOP introduced other themes that would run throughout her life’s work: fairy tales and the unconscious.

Her last novel, WISE CHILDREN (1991) told the tale of the female members of a theatrical family. The book, narrated by Dora Chance, celebrated optimism and humor. At the time she said,

"Sometimes I think, if I look hard enough, I can see back into the past. There goes the wind, again. Crash. Over goes the dustbin, all the trash spills out... empty cat-food cans, cornflakes packets, laddered tights, tea leaves... I am at present working on my memoirs and researching family history - see the word processor, the filing cabinet, the card indexes, right hand, left hand, right side, left side, all the dirt on everybody. What a wind!"

The work that is the definitive one for me, one that has inspired essays and dissertations since it’s publication, is THE BLOODY CHAMBER. A series of short stories, or essentially adult fairy tales, told in Carter’s all encompassing, opulent narrative, THE BLOODY CHAMBER tells almost all of these tales without even giving name to the characters. Even without them, they evoke the resonance of dreams and nightmares with a sensual and oft times violent air. THE COMPANY of WOLVES, almost certainly Carter’s most celebrated story, tells of a Little Red Riding Hood willingly seduced by the Big, Bad Wolf.

The first story of Carter's I ever read is in an anthology of short stories drawn called WOMEN WHO RUN WITH WOLVES . It was THE TIGERS BRIDE and is matched only by Neil Gaimon's CHIVALRY for charm and dark adult whimsy. Shades of 'Beauty and the Beast' can be seen but this is more the tale of vice, love, sex and the animal nature in us all. From the simple, intellectual analysis of a woman objectified parceled off because ‘My father lost me to The Beast at cards.’ She is handed off from one male to another with a secret destiny to be met. If one turns one’s dispassionate self off, the passion and beauty of the story come to the fore. Know that this is above all a sensual tale and a tale of freedom of self. Not Freudian, not Jungian but more Cambellian –“Follow your bliss.” It is when she sheds her clothes and her inhibitions that the reluctent bride's true nature is revealed.

When Anna Katsavos asked Carter what she meant in “Notes From the Front Line” in which she says she is not in re-mythologizing business but in the ‘de-mythologizing business’ Carter had this to say:

“Well, I'm basically trying to find out what certain configurations of imagery in our society, in our culture, really stand for, what they mean, underneath the kind of semireligious coating that makes people not particularly want to interfere with them”.

We are a culture of people that need desperately to be interfered with and Carter’s writing, with its soul exposing elegance and beautiful, vicious truth is a wonderful way to make it happen.

"The amazing thing about her, for me, was that someone who looked so much like the Fairy Godmother... should actually be so much like the Fairy Godmother,"- Margaret Atwood

I recommend BURNING YOUR BOATS: Collected Stories for those first delving into Carter's work.

Selected works:

• SHADOW DANCE / HONEYBUZZARD, 1966
• THE MAGIC TOYSHOP, 1967
• SEVERAL PERCEPTIONS, 1968
• HEROES AND VILLAINS, 1969
• LOVE, 1971 (rev. 1987)
• THE INFERNAL DESIRE MACHINES OF DOCTOR HOFFMAN, 1972
• FIREWORKS, 1974
• THE PASSION OF NEW EVE, 1977
• BLOODY CHAMBER, 1979
• MARTIN LEMAN'S COMIC AND CURIOUS CATS, 1979
• THE FAIRY TALES OF CHARLES PERRAULT, 1979 translator
• THE SADEIAN WOMAN: AN EXERCISE IN CULTURAL HISTORY, 1979
• NOTHING SACRED, 1982
• MOONSHADOW, 1982 (with J. Todd)
• NIGHTS AT THE CIRCUS, 1984 - Sirkusyöt
• THE COMPANY OF WOLVES, 1984 - film dir. by Neil Jordan screenplay
• BLACK VENUS, 1985
• COME UNTO THESE YELLOW SANDS, 1985 radio drama
• SAINTS AND STRANGERS, 1986
• WAYWARD GIRLS AND WICKED WOMEN, 1986 editor
• WISE CHILDREN, 1991
• SLEEPING BEAUTY AND OTHER FAVORITE FAIRY TALES, 1991 translator
• EXPLETIVES DELETED: SELECTED WRITINGS, 1992
• THE VIRAGO BOOK OF FAIRY TALES, 1990-92 (2 vols.) editor
• AMERICAN GHOSTS AND OLD WORLD WONDERS, 1993
• BURNING YOUR BOATS: COLLECTED STORIES, 1996 (including THE BLOOD CHAMBER)
• SHAKING A LEG: COLLECTED WRITINGS, 1998 (ed. by Jenny Uglow)