Angela
Olive
Stalker was born in Eastbourne in 1940.
She was evacuated to live with her maternal grandmother in Yorkshire shortly
after, due to the bombing raids of the Second World War. Her father, Hugh Alexander Stalker, was
a Scottish journalist working in London.
Her maternal grandfather had been a soldier in India, and although he
had died before Angela was born, the possessions that he had left her mother
had an Imperial ring about them that obviously became deeply ingrained in
Angela’s imagination. Angela was brought up in London, and attended the local
grammar school after passing the Eleven Plus. She became anorexic around this time, which was later to
have an influence on her writing. When she was 19, she started work as a
journalist at “The Croydon Advertiser”. A year later, she married Paul
Carter. In 1962, she read English
at Bristol University, specialising in Medieval Literature, which again, would
prove to be influential in her own writing.
Angela Carter settled in Bristol for much of the 60s, and
this was where many of her early novels were set. Indeed, they are sometimes referred to as the “Bristol Trilogy”:
“Shadow
Dance” (1966) (“Honeybuzzard” in the US), “Several
Perceptions” (1968), and “Love”
(1971). Angela Carter also worked
as a reviewer from 1966 onwards, for “New Society” and “The Guardian”. Her second novel, “The Magic
Toyshop”, was published in 1967, and won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial
Prize, which gave Angela Carter more public recognition. This was followed by
“Several Perceptions” in 1968, and “Heroes and
Villains” in 1969. This was
also the year that Angela Carter separated from her husband, after having won
the Somerset Maugham prize, which she used to help fund a couple of years
living in Japan. This stay in a
foreign land helped produce many pieces for “New Society” that were later
collected in a volume called “Nothing
Sacred” (1982). From 1972, she
lived in Bath, and now began to produce many of her most famous works: “The
Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman” (1972), “Fireworks:
Nine Profane Pieces” (1974), “The
Passion of New Eve” (1977), and “The Bloody
Chamber and other stories” (1979).
London became her home again in 1976, and she married Mark Pearce. She also embarked on a successful
career in teaching Creative Writing when she became an Arts Council Fellow at
the University of Sheffield from 1976 to 1978. She later held posts at Rhode
Island, the University of Adelaide, and also taught on the famous University of
East Anglia Creative Writing MA. In 1979, she produced a work of cultural
history called “The Sadeian Woman”.
1984 saw the release of “The
Company of Wolves”, a film directed by Neil Jordan based on some of the
stories from “The Bloody Chamber”, for which Angela Carter wrote the
screenplay. The movie successfully
brought Angela Carter’s blend of Gothic/Magic Realism and the reworking of
fairy tales to a wider audience.
Her next novel, “Nights at
the Circus” was also released in 1984, and has recently become a
spectacular stage play. “The Magic
Toyshop” also became a television film in 1987. Her final novel, “Wise
Children”, was released in 1991.
By this time, Angela Carter was suffering from cancer, and bypassed
treatment in order to complete the novel.
Other anthologies of her fiction are “Black
Venus” (1985), “American
Ghosts and Old World Wonders” (1993), “Burning
your Boats” 1995, and “The
Curious Room” was a collection of her scripts for movies, films, and plays
(1996). Her journalism has also been collected in the volumes “Expletives
Deleted” (1992), and “Shaking a
Leg” (1997). Angela Carter
also wrote for children: “The Donkey Prince” (1970), “Miss Z,
the Dark Young Lady” (1970), “Comic and
Curious Cats” (1979), “The Music People” (1980), “Moonshadow”
(1982), and “Sea-Cat
and the Dragon King” was published posthumously in 2000. Angela Carter died
in 1992.
Interview with Angela Carter – Anna
Katsavos’ interview with her from 1988
The Werewolf – an
Angela Carter short story
A
very good wizard, a very dear friend – Salman Rushdie’s tribute to Angela
Carter
Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Angela Carter’s The
Magic Toyshop – Kevin Patrick Mahoney’s
essay
Writing
a history of difference: Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry and Angela
Carter’s Wise Children – Jeffrey Roessner’s essay
The
Modern English Visonary: Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor and Angela Carter’s The
Passion of New Eve – Edward J. Ahearn’s essay
Perverse
Pleasure and the Fetishized Text: the deathly erotics of Carter’s The Bloody
Chamber – Becky McLaughlin’s essay
Sweetest
tongue has sharpest tooth: the dangers of dreaming in Neil Jordan’s The Company
of Wolves – Carole Zucker’s essay
The Infernal Desire
Machines of Angela Carter – Jeff VanderMeer’s comprehensive essay
Tall Tales and Brief
Lives: Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus – Brian Finney’s essay
The Ravished Reader: Angela
Carter’s Allegory in Nights at the Circus – Marita Kristiansen’s essay
Arachnological,
intertextual weavings in Angela Carter’s Writing – Andrew Milne’s essay
Angela
Carter on the ideology of Pornography: Rereading Marquis de Sade – Julia
Samarina’s essay
Living
in the Present: an analysis of tense switching in Angela Carter’s The Bloody
Chamber – Timothy Mason’s essay
Pornography,
Ethics and Feminine Writing: a study of Angela Carter’s “Polemical Preface”
– Frederic Regard’s essay
The Grotesque in
the works of Frederico Fellini and Angela Carter – Maura O’Gara’s essay
Chainani, Soman "Sadeian Tragedy:
The Politics of Content Revision in Angela Carter's "Snow
Child""
Marvels & Tales - Volume 17, Number 2, 2003, pp. 212-235
Wayne State
University Press
Cella,
Laurie J. C. "Narrative "Confidence Games": Framing the Blonde
Spectacle in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) and Nights at the Circus
(1984)"
Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies - Volume 24, Number 3, 2003, pp. 47-62
University of Nebraska
Press
