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Every English girl born in 1940 had as her birthright the opportunity to travel, divorce, become radicalised and to retell the female experience in her own words.

Angela Carter made the most of this opportunity in a short but prodigious career until her death in 1992. She spent the prize money from the Somerset Maugham Award on ditching her husband and moving to Japan. There, she said, she learnt about being a woman, and came back ready for more — more writing, more politics, more travel, more life. As one obituary said, she was “the opposite of parochial”. More than 30 magical, female-centred volumes of fiction, poetry, drama, anthology, children’s books and journalism bear this out.

At the heart of her crusade against outdated mores was a trenchant feminism. Although her childhood was happy, she suffered the insecurities of her age, including anorexia, which informed her critique of woman as a volatile thing in need of policing. From her classic 1960s paean to self-discovery, The Magic Toyshop, to the delights of Wise Children, a Shakespearean vision of fatherless daughters, play-acting and sexual morality, she produced books that modern women, men and children want — and need — to read. And who can resist The Bloody Chamber? These visceral excisions of the juiciest, darkest parts of favourite fairytales reveal a literary sorceress to be reckoned with.

One to read: The Bloody Chamber (1979)

More about Angela Carter

Read her obituary, printed in the Times on February 17, 1992

Carter the unstoppable...

A remembrance by Salman Rushdie, from the New York Times

Angela Carter quotes

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