Angela Carter

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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.
Black-and-white portrait photograph of Angela Carter, seated, at an event in Lecce, Italy, May 1986.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
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...
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 Production Marina Warner
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.
Warner, Marina. “Why I Write”. Kunapipi, Vol.
16
, No. 1, Dangaroo Press, Aarhus, Denmark, p. 505.
505
To her, writing was also...
Textual Production Marina Warner
Warner has written a significant number of book introductions to texts including Christine de Pisan 's The Book of the City of Ladies, Angela Carter 's edited volume The Second Virago Book of Fairy...
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...
Textual Production Beryl Bainbridge
Hodder and Stoughton turned it down, then Chapman and Hall , then Chatto and Windus , all with words of encouragement which BB felt too insecure to take in. These were later joined by Weidenfeld and Nicolson
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...
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 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
Textual Features Michelene Wandor
This includes work by Nora Bartlett , Sara Maitland , Judith Kazantzis , Wendy Mulford , Libby Houston , Cora Kaplan , Michèle Roberts , Angela Carter , Noel Greig , Rozsika Parker , Alison Hennegan
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.
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...
Textual Features Carol Ann Duffy
Critic Deryn Rees-Jones discerns widely varied influences on CAD 's work: mainstream English poets like Wordsworth , Robert Browning , T. S. Eliot , Auden , Dylan Thomas , Larkin , and Ted Hughes ...
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...

Timeline

1 January 1916: The British edition of Vogue (an American...

Building item

1 January 1916

The British edition of Vogue (an American fashion magazine) began publishing from Condé Nast in Hanover Square, London.

By early November 1973: Experimental novelist B. S. Johnson prefaced...

Writing climate item

By early November 1973

Experimental novelist B. S. Johnson prefaced his short-story volume Aren't You Rather Young To Be Writing Your Memoirs? with a polemical critique listing only sixteen serious contemporary British writers.

May 1978: Virago Press issued its first Virago Modern...

Women writers item

May 1978

Virago Press issued its first Virago Modern Classics, a historically important series most though not all of which were novels.

By mid-October 1983: Ursula Owen, editor of Virago Press, published...

Women writers item

By mid-October 1983

Ursula Owen , editor of Virago Press , published with them an anthology of essays: Fathers: Reflections by Daughters.

8 May 2008: Virago Press marked thirty years of Virago...

Women writers item

8 May 2008

Virago Press marked thirty years of Virago Modern Classics by re-issuing works by Barbara Pym , E. M. Delafield , Elizabeth Taylor , Jacqueline Susann , Muriel Spark , Helene Hanff , Zora Neale Hurston , and Angela Carter .

Texts

Carter, Angela. Expletives Deleted. Chatto and Windus, 1992.
Carter, Angela. Five Quiet Shouters: An Anthology of Assertive Verse. Editor Tebb, Barry, Poet & Printer.
Carter, Angela. Heroes and Villains. Heinemann, 1969.
Warner, Marina. “Introduction”. The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales, edited by Angela Carter, Virago, 1993, p. ix - xvii.
Carter, Angela. Love. Hart-Davis, 1971.
Carter, Angela, and Martin Leman. Martin Leman’s Comic and Curious Cats. Gollancz, 1979.
Carter, Angela. “Mise-en-Scène for a Parricide”. London Review of Books, Vol.
3
, No. 16, pp. 21-4.
Carter, Angela. Nights at the Circus. Chatto and Windus, 1984.
Carter, Angela. “Notes from the Front Line”. On Gender and Writing, edited by Michelene Wandor, Pandora Press, 1983, pp. 69-77.
Carter, Angela. Nothing Sacred. Virago, 1982.
Carter, Angela. Several Perceptions. Heinemann, 1968.
Carter, Angela. Shadow Dance. Heinemann, 1966.
Carter, Angela. Shaking a Leg: Journalism and Writings: Angela Carter. Chatto and Windus, 1997.
Carter, Angela. The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. Gollancz, 1979.
Carter, Angela. The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman. Hart-Davis, 1972.
Carter, Angela. The Magic Toyshop. Heinemann, 1967.
Carter, Angela. The Passion of New Eve. Gollancz, 1977.
Carter, Angela. The Sadeian Woman. Virago, 1979.
Carter, Angela. Unicorn. A Tlaloc print-out, 1966.
Carter, Angela, editor. Wayward Girls and Wicked Women: An Anthology of Stories. Virago, 1986.
Carter, Angela. Wise Children. Chatto and Windus, 1991.