Angela Carter

Angela Carter
Born	Angela Olive Stalker (1940-05-07)7 May 1940 Eastbourne, England
Died	16 February 1992(1992-02-16) (aged 51) London, England
Occupation	Novelist, short story writer, journalist
Nationality	British
Alma mater	University of Bristol
Spouse	Paul Carter (m. 1960; div. 1972) Mark Pearce (m. 1977)
Children	1
Website
www.angelacarter.co.uk

Angela Olive Carter-Pearce (née Stalker; 7 May 1940 – 16 February 1992), who published under the pen name Angela Carter, was an English novelist, short story writer and journalist, known for her feminist, magical realism, and picaresque works. She is best known for her book The Bloody Chamber, which was published in 1979. In 2008, The Times ranked Carter tenth in their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".^[1] In 2012, Nights at the Circus was selected as the best ever winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.^[2]

Biography

Born Angela Olive Stalker in Eastbourne, in 1940, to Sophia Olive (née Farthing; 1905–1969) and Hugh Alexander Stalker (1896–1988), Carter was evacuated as a child to live in Yorkshire with her maternal grandmother. As a teenager she battled against anorexia.^[3] After attending Streatham and Clapham High School, in south London, she began work as a journalist on The Croydon Advertiser,^[4] following in the footsteps of her father. Carter attended the University of Bristol where she studied English literature.^[5]. Up until her teenage years she was an obedient and 'chubby' child until she went on diet, lost weight and changed her style of dress. This was perhaps why she became anorexic. She became a rude child who challenged authorities and was abusive to her mother, at this point she had few friends. She switched between extreme shyness and depression. This change did not however affect her performance in school. She decided against applying to Oxford University and chose marriage instead which she felt would allow her to escape her parents.^[6]

She married twice, first in 1960 to Paul Carter,^[4] divorcing in 1972. In 1969, she used the proceeds of her Somerset Maugham Award to leave her husband and relocate for two years to Tokyo, where she claims in Nothing Sacred (1982) that she "learnt what it is to be a woman and became radicalised".^[7] She wrote about her experiences there in articles for New Society and a collection of short stories, Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1974), and evidence of her experiences in Japan can also be seen in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972).

She then explored the United States, Asia and Europe, helped by her fluency in French and German. She spent much of the late 1970s and 1980s as a writer in residence at universities, including the University of Sheffield, Brown University, the University of Adelaide, and the University of East Anglia. In 1977, Carter met Mark Pearce, with whom she had one son and whom she married shortly before her death.^[8] In 1979, both The Bloody Chamber, and her feminist essay, The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography,^[9] appeared. In the essay, according to the writer Marina Warner, Carter "deconstructs the arguments that underlie The Bloody Chamber. It's about desire and its destruction, the self-immolation of women, how women collude and connive with their condition of enslavement. She was much more independent-minded than the traditional feminist of her time."^[10]

As well as being a prolific writer of fiction, Carter contributed many articles to The Guardian, The Independent and New Statesman, collected in Shaking a Leg.^[11] She adapted a number of her short stories for radio and wrote two original radio dramas on Richard Dadd and Ronald Firbank. Two of her fictions have been adapted for film: The Company of Wolves (1984) and The Magic Toyshop (1987). She was actively involved in both adaptations;^[12] her screenplays are published in the collected dramatic writings, The Curious Room, together with her radio scripts, a libretto for an opera of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, an unproduced screenplay entitled The Christchurch Murders (based on the same true story as Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures) and other works. These neglected works, as well as her controversial television documentary, The Holy Family Album, are discussed in Charlotte Crofts' book, Anagrams of Desire (2003). Her novel Nights at the Circus won the 1984 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for literature. Her last novel, Wise Children, is a surreal wild ride through British theatre and music hall traditions.

At the time of her death, Carter had started work on a sequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre based on the later life of Jane's stepdaughter, Adèle Varens; only a synopsis survives.^[13]

Angela Carter died aged 51 in 1992 at her home in London after developing lung cancer.^[14][15]

Works

Works on Angela Carter

• Dimovitz, Scott A. Angela Carter: Surrealist, Psychologist, Moral Pornographer. New York: Routledge, 2016.
• Dimovitz, Scott A. 'I Was the Subject of the Sentence Written on the Mirror: Angela Carter's Short Fiction and the Unwriting of the Psychoanalytic Subject.' Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 21.1 (2010): 1-19.
• Dimovitz, Scott A. 'Angela Carter’s Narrative Chiasmus: The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and The Passion of New Eve.' Genre XVII (2009): 83-111.
• Dimovitz, Scott A. 'Cartesian Nuts: Rewriting the Platonic Androgyne in Angela Carter’s Japanese Surrealism'. FEMSPEC: An Interdisciplinary Feminist Journal, 6:2 (December 2005): 15–31.
• Dmytriieva, Valeriia V. 'Gender Alterations in English and French Modernist “Bluebeard” Fairytale'. ' English Language and literature studies, 6:3. (2016): 16–20.
• Enright, Anne (17 February 2011). "Diary". London Review of Books. 33 (4): 38–39. Retrieved 11 February 2011.
• Gordon, Edmund The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography London: Chatto & Windus, 2016.
• Kérchy, Anna (2008), Body-Texts in the Novels of Angela Carter. Writing from a Corporeagraphic Perspective. Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press
• Milne, Andrew (2006), The Bloody Chamber d'Angela Carter, Paris: Editions Le Manuscrit, Université
• Milne, Andrew (2007), Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber: A Reader's Guide, Paris: Editions Le Manuscrit Université
• Tonkin, Maggie. Angela Carter and Decadence: Critical Fictions/Fictional Critiques. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
• Topping, Angela (2009), Focus on The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories London: The Greenwich Exchange

References

Further reading

• Acocella, Joan (March 13, 2017). "Metamorphoses : how Angela Carter became feminism's great mythologist". The Critics. Books. The New Yorker. 93 (4): 71–76. ^[1]
• Wisker, Gina. "At Home all was Blood and Feathers: The Werewolf in the Kitchen - Angela Carter and Horror". In Clive Bloom (ed), Creepers: British Horror and Fantasy in the Twentieth Century. London and Boulder CO: Pluto Press, 1993, pp. 161–75.

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Angela Carter

• Official website of the Estate of Angela Carter
• Angela Carter at British Council: Literature
• BBC interview (video, 25 June 1991, 25 mins)
• Petri Liukkonen. "Angela Carter". Books and Writers
• Angela Carter at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Angela Carter on IMDb
• "Angela Carter remembered" Daily Telegraph 3 May 2010
• A Conversation with Angela Carter by Anna Katsavos, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 1994, Vol. 14.3
• Angela Carter talks about her life and work to Elizabeth Jolley, British Library (audio, 1988, 53 mins)
• Essay on Colette, Vol. 2 No. 19 · 2 October 1980, London Review of Books by Angela Carter
• Angela Carter's radio work
• Angela Carter at the British Library