Friday 21 November 2008
Angela Carter - writer
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Introduction
Angela Carter, born May 7, 1940, wrote nine novels, seven children's books, five collections of short stories, and a book of poetry, along with dozens of works of non-fiction, critical essays, journalism articles, radio and screenplays during an extraordinarly creative writing career that ended with her death on February 16, 1992.
The writer and journalist, born Angela Olive Stalker, became Angela Carter with her first marriage, to Paul Carter, in 1960 - six years before the publication of her first novel, Shadow Dance. Her last and perhaps greatest novel, Wise Children, was published in 1991, having bypassed treatment for the cancer that would kill her in order to finish the novel.
Her legacy as one of the most important English writers has continued with her work studied as set texts in schools and universities. She remains one of the most unique voices in contemporary fiction, blending fantasy, romance, gothic and science fiction with allegory and symbolism.
Biography
Angela Stalker was born in Eastbourne, Sussex, where her mother (Olive) had gone to escape the bombing in London. Olive was from South Yorkshire, Carter's father, Hugh Alexander, was a Scottish journalist.
She was evacuated as a toddler to live with her maternal grandmother in Yorkshire during the bombings and, as she grew up, her holidays were spent either with her grandmother or with the Scottish family.
Carter grew up in South London, by her own account an anorexic teacher with obsessivly possesive parents, but also described her childhood as: "Life passed at a languorous pace, everything was gently untidy, and none of the clocks ever told the right time". Her mother was a literate woman who influenced Carter's early reading, but was dogged by ill-health and died in 1969.
From 1958-61, Carter followed her father into journalism, working at the Croydon Advertiser, before giving up work for university in 1962, going to Bristol to study English, specialising in Medieval Literature.
In 1960, she married her first husband, Paul Carter, and settled in Bristol for most of the '60s, where her earliest novels are set.
Her first, Shadow Dance was written during a summer holiday. Her second, The Magic Toyshop (1967), revealed Carter's fascination with fairy tales and won her the Jon Llwellyn Rhys Prize.
Her third novel, Several Perceptions (1968) won her the Somerset Maugham Award and a £500 prize, which she used to start a new life - leaving her husband and moving to Tokyo in 1969 where she lived for two years. The Carters divorced in 1972.
In Japan, she worked in bars and, in her words "became radicalised" as a woman. She wrote about her experiences in articles for New Society (collected into Nothing Sacred 1982) and a collection of short stories - Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1974).
She then began a period of travelling around the world - to America, Asia and across Europe, soaking up influences and imagery, meeting along the way: "The most beautiful transvestite in the whole of Greenwich Village, a Russian wrestler who had a wallet of photographs showing himself wrestling with a bear; a frayed Japanese with nicotine-stained teeth who told me Dostoevsky was his spiritual father." (Shaking a Leg).
She worked on and off over the next decade as a part-time lecturer and resident writer at Brown University, Rhode Island, the University of Adelaide, South Australia and the University of East Anglia, Norwich, while producing some of her best know work.
From 1972, she lived in Bath, where she produced The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1974) and The Passion of New Eve (1977).
In 1976, she moved back to London , and in 1977, married Mark Pearce and the couple settled in Balham, south London. She became an Arts Council Fellow at the University of Sheffield from 1976 to 1978.
In 1979 she published The Bloody Chamber and other stories and a non-fiction cultural history The Sadeian Women the same year.
1984 saw the release of The Company of Wolves, a film by Neil Jordan based on some of the stories from The Bloody Chamber, with the screenplay by Carter. Her novel, Nights At The Circus, published the same year (1984) has been adapted for the theatre by the Kneehigh Theatre Company. The Magic Toyshop became a television film in 1987, adapted by Carter.
She became a mother in 1982, aged 42, and her final novel, Wise Children (1991) reflects her thinking about parenthood and ageing. She died of lung cancer, aged 51, in 1992, with her husband Mark and son Alexander beside her.
- "She is a splendid example of the woman writer who made it from the margins; also, just as important, a writer who always demonstrates how vital counter-cultural impulses are to the very existence of any worthwhile tradition." (Lorna Sage, The Guardian obituary)
Fiction bibliography
(needs summaries)
- Shadow Dance (1966) - published as Honeybuzzard in the United States. Features the magnificently bizarre and amoral protagonist Honeybuzzard, who has disfigured his gorgeous girlfriend and goes on to murder.
- The Magic Toyshop (1967)
- Several Perceptions (1968)
- Heroes and Villains (1969)
- Love (1971)
- The Infernal desires Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972) - published in the US as The War Of Dreams
- Fireworks (1973) - short story collection
- The Passion of New Eve (1977)
- The Bloody Chamber (1979) - short story collection
- Nights At The Circus (1984)
- Black Venus (1985) - short story collection. Published in the US as Saints and Strangers
- Wise Children (1991)
- American Ghosts and Old World Wonders - short story collection
Non-fiction bibliography
(needs writing)
Recurring themes
(needs writing)
Criticism and tributes
(needs writing)
Sources
http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5060
http://perso.orange.fr/andrew.milne/
http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/c/angela-carter/
http://www.authortrek.com/angela_carter_page.html
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,102086,00.html