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.
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...
Textual Features
Bryony Lavery
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.
Literary responses
Jackie Kay
Anne Enright
in a review of this collection for the Guardian was typical in her warmth of appreciation. Kay, she said, gives hugely of her talent; pours it on to the page. She often sets...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Jolley
Angela Carter
, reviewing Foxybaby for the New York Review of Books, described its characters as lonely, loony, unhappy, existentially deranged, and praised EJ
's ability to combine profound feeling with low farce, high...
Travel
Bessie Head
BH
attended the Adelaide Festival in Australia, in company with famous names such as Angela Carter
and Salman Rushdie
; she found that many festival-goers did not know of her or her books, but...
Literary responses
Mary Fortune
To critic Andrew ManghamThe White Maniac examplifies a Victorian fascination with the potential for violence and irrationality in female adolescents, and detection as sustain[ing] a number of social hierarchies through the actual and figurative...
Friends, Associates
Elaine Feinstein
While she was teaching at Essex, EF
met a number of poets, including Ed Dorn
, who fed her interest in American poetry. She was also involved during these years with a group including Tom Pickard
Instructor
Anne Enright
Most significant among those who taught her were Angela Carter
and Malcolm Bradbury
, especially the former: she had applied for this course on the strength of her reading of Carter
's The Bloody Chamber...
With essays under such titles as Ideal Homes, Kissing, Naughty but Nice: Food Pornography, and Men's Bodies, Female Desire interrogates the matter-of-fact details and events of everyday life, revealing the complex...
Literary responses
Leonora Carrington
Its publisher notes Angela Carter
's praise for LC
's writing: Her work bristles with a fierce, unconventional brand of feminism; anger gives it its final edge of irony and power
“The Complete Stories, Leonora Carrington”. Dorothy, A Publishing Project.
Textual Features
A. S. Byatt
Her selection (limited to English, not merely British, writers) determinedly eschews the well-known. She seeks the startling and the satisfying, selecting both lesser-known writers like Leonora Carrington
or Elizabeth Taylor
, and unexpected stories...
Family and Intimate relationships
Charles Baudelaire
In 1842 he began a relationship with the mixed-race actress Jeanne Duval
(who a century and a half later was transformed into the narrator of Angela Carter
's title story in her Black Venus...
Intertextuality and Influence
Pat Barker
She produced three sensitive and polite
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
novels (which have never been published), set among the middle class to which she now belonged. Then she attended a creative writing course in which novelist Angela Carter
read...
Publishing
Pat Barker
PB
says that one stage she threw away the manuscript of this novel in despair, but her husband
rescued it from the bin.
Jaggi, Maya. “Pat Barker. Dispatches from the front”. The Guardian, pp. G2: 16 - 19.
18
She said she felt the absence of models for writing fiction...
