Tracey Norman

A little bit about Angela Carter from her official website.

Angela Carter was born in Sussex in 1940 and read English at Bristol University.

From 1976 to 1978, she was Arts Council of Great Britain Fellow in Creative Writing at Sheffield University, and from 1980 to 1981, Visiting Professor in the Writing Program at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.

She then traveled and taught widely in the USA and Australia.

She was awarded the John Llewellyn Reese Memorial Prize for The Magic Toy Shop, the Somerset Maugham Award for Several Perceptions, the Cheltenham Festival of Literature Award for The Bloody Chamber, that's the book we're going to be talking about today, and the James Tate Black Memorial Prize for Nights at the Circus.

Married with one son, Angela Carter died of lung

cancer in February 1992.

That's pretty dry.

So here's an excerpt to go with that from The Economist regarding the 2016 publication of The Invention of Angela Carter, a biography by Edmund Gordon.

Readers and critics have tended to pigeonhole Angela Carter or reshape her in their own image.

Undergraduates often reduce the British novelist whose stories are known for their magical realism.

and striking female characters to a mouthpiece of feminism.

Tributes when she died in 1992 at just 51 cast her as a fairy queen, a benevolent white witch, and a fairy godmother.

The novelist loathed being appropriated or misinterpreted.

When an editor, believing Carter to be an earth mother, asked her to write about the summer solstice at Stonehenge, she said, "'You just haven't gotten me, have you, dear?' The true Carter emerges from the pages of Edmund Gordon's expansive new biography thanks to a huge body of journals and letters.

Her mother was infantilizing, prudish, and smothering.

Her father was a loquacious and much-loved journalist who treated Angela to expensive gifts, dresses, and a succession of cats.

Putty in his daughter's hands, her father, Carter, complained in 1983, did not prepare

her well for patriarchy.

At 17, Angela rebelled by taking up smoking, wearing tight skirts, and swearing openly and elaborately.

A colleague at the Croydon Advertiser said that he had never heard a woman use the F-word in his life, but Angie did it all the time.

This early life, particularly the claustrophobic relationship with her mother, left an imprint upon her writing.

In The Christchurch Murder, based on a true story, she considered why a teenager might be driven to matricide.

Carter felt that writing was a means to ask questions, not to provide answers.

Her relationship with the feminist movement was one of sniping from the sidelines rather than active involvement.