Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Angela Carter
-
Standard Name: Carter, Angela
Birth Name: Angela Olive Stalker
Married Name: Angela Olive Carter
AC
was a prolific writer in many genres throughout the later twentieth century. Best known for her novels and short stories, she also wrote plays (for radio, screen and stage), poetry, children's stories, journal articles, an opera libretto, and a critical work on the Marquis de Sade
(as well as on pornography and women's relation to it). A translator of Charles Perrault
's fairy tales, she edited several fairy-tale collections, and an anthology of women's tales. Her name is prominent in critical discussion of various recent modes of fiction: magic realist, gothic, and feminist.
The Magic Toyshop, which BL
adapted from Angela Carter
's second novel (published in 1967) and seen at the Dublin Fringe Festival in October 2001, is a gothic fantasy about a mad, patriarchal toy-maker.
Performance of text
Bryony Lavery
BL
's stage adaptation of Angela Carter
's The Bloody Chamber opened at Northern Stage
in Newcastle
Mslexia. Mslexia Publications.
38: 69
Textual Production
Bryony Lavery
BL
's numerous plays for radio include some original and some adapted from other works: Laying Ghosts, The Twelve Days of Christmas, Velma and Therese (a parallel version of the film Thelma and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Doris Lessing
Angela Carter
said that DL
's stories of the 1950s shaped the way I, for one, perceived the world.
This book takes another sombre look at the national and international political situation. In the title story the three little pigs are cowering in their brick house, still afraid, while the fourth imagines the agony...
Literary responses
Michèle Roberts
MR
is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (elected in 1999) and a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (awarded in 2000).
British Council Film and Literature Department, in association with Book Trust. Contemporary Writers in the UK. http://www.contemporarywriters.com.
“Professor Michele Roberts”. University of East Anglia.
In 2009 Susanne Gruss
published a monograph entitled The...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ali Smith
The book's narrator is an unnamed, ungendered arborist in mourning for his or her unnamed, ungendered partner, a literary academic whose spectre lingers about the book both figuratively, in the form of unfinished lectures, and...
Textual Production
Ali Smith
With her background in academia and her work reviewing fiction for The Scotsman and The Guardian, AS
has produced an impressive amount of literary criticism. She has written critical introductions for reissues of work...
Textual Production
Christina Stead
At the age of eleven CS
won a district competition for an essay. Her subject (derived from the work of her father
the naturalist) was the life-cycle of the frog. Within a few years she...
Literary responses
Christina Stead
One outspoken admirer of CS
was Angela Carter
, who likened the experience of reading her to plunging into the mess of life itself'.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
She strongly recommended Stead's work for re-issuing in the Virago Modern...
Textual Features
Maud Sulter
Pursuing her established interest in the Black presence in Europe, MS
here relates the story of Duval
, mistress of the French poet Charles Baudelaire
, the Black Venus of his poetry, who was fictionalised...
Textual Production
Emma Tennant
During the 1960s ET
wrote for magazines like Queen and Vogue. She was founder-editor of Bananas, a journal of new writing that ran from 1975 to 1981 and attracted contributors like Angela Carter
Textual Features
Emma Tennant
The story is presented as a spellbinding tale told to little girls by the ancient crone-like Grandmother Dummer. Beginning with traditional tales, she moves to an updated, feminist fairy story in the manner of Angela Carter
MW
's passion for books began early. Describing her motivations for writing, she says I was a bookworm as a child because I liked entering other worlds through stories.
