Angela Carter, novelist and short story writer, died of cancer yesterday in
London aged 51. She was born on May 7, 1940.
THERE was a time when Angela Carter's evident enjoyment of the pornographic
element in the literature of sexuality and her apparent relish for the
macabre and the excessive in the way men orchestrate their sexual relations
was perceived to be at odds with what she manifestly was a progressive,
socialistic, feministic, university-educated sort of woman, and latterly a
contented wife and mother.
From the very first her writing burst the bonds of that arch restraint that
had characterised the exploration of sexual situations in the novels of her
contemporary (though, for the most part, somewhat older) women novelists.
The world in which she operated as a writer was a far cry from their nice
observation of social nuances and well-bred adulteries.
Angela Carter was an unashamed fantasist, a fabulist of daemonic energy. She
dwelt naturally in the world of myth, dream and fairy tale. Above all, in
writing about sex she confronted the question of whether a woman can
realistically cross the barrier between her natural masochism to inhabit the
sadistic terrain of the male, with a seriousness which is wholly absent from
the novels of her contemporaries. She squarely faced the possibility that
sex is ultimately a violent business and that women can acquiesce in that.
This sometimes led her into vulgarity. She, too evidently and too often,
leaned for information on reading which ranged from the scholarly to the
crudest pulp fantasy. Sometimes even her admirers might pause to wonder
whether she cared about the answers to the questions she set herself. So
wholeheartedly did she engage herself with sexual themes which have so long
been the preserve of male novelists that a truly independent standpoint by
women is very difficult to formulate without becoming strident and therefore
ceasing to be literature. But she remained true to herself and emerged from
this process of immersion with an uncorrupted imagination. As time went on
she was accepted as being among the most original and serious women writers
of her generation. This carried with it the danger of cult status. But that
was not something she ever wanted for herself. Indisputably, with her, the
macabre came as naturally as the leaves on a tree and was not manufactured
or affected as it was in the works of so many of her fellows.
Angela Carter was born in Eastbourne and might well have been brought up on
the Sussex costa geriatrica. But it was not to be. Grandma, a Yorkshire
woman of iron resolve (Angela Carter was later to ascribe her own
determination to this source), had come south to supervise the birth and
felt that the south coast in the aftermath of Dunkirk was no place to bring
up young children. She removed the family to the comparative safety of the
Yorkshire coalfield where one of her granddaughter's earliest memories was
of her standing on a slagheap and imprecating at Hitler's aircraft as they
flew in to bomb Leeds and Manchester (Angela Carter's actual age at such a
time suggests that myth was an early substitute for a factual memory in her
dealings with the world of reality, but this was literature's gain).
Later the family moved to south London where she was educated at a girls'
grammar school in Streatham. She hated the formal part of her education.
More interesting were the films (sometimes ones not strictly suitable for
young ladies) which her father, the second powerful influence on her life,
took her to at the local cinema. Her reaction against school took a drastic
form. As a subconscious objection, so she was later to claim, to the
possessiveness of her mother, who had threatened to take a flat to be near
her daughter should she pass into Oxford, Angela Carter developed
spectacular anorexia nervosa and determined to flunk her A-levels. Her
father, a man of sense and a journalist who had worked for the Press
Association, saw all this was doing her no good and got her a job on the
Croydon Advertiser. She was no journalist by nature. Her early disregard of
the sanctity of fact made her an improbable member of any newsdesk which
hopes to stay clear of litigation. Nevertheless, she found a niche writig
record reviews and features and coexisted not unhappily with her job.
In 1960 she married Paul Carter, an industrial chemist. When, in the following
year, he got a job teaching chemistry at Bristol Technical College, she went
with him. For a short period she found herself being ``just a wife'' and
spent the time between seething discontentment at the tedium, as she found
it, of domestic life (this was not her husband's fault: he took her on peace
marches and introduced her to jazz) and a fascination with the student and
cafe life of Bristol, which she frequented in her wanderings about the
streets. Then an uncle suggesed she go to Bristol University, where she read
English literature, immersing herself, in particular, in those areas of the
middle ages which had escaped the attentions of the fanatical followers of
F. R. Leavis.
She started writing as an undergraduate and made her debut with Shadow Dance
(1966) which she wrote in the summer vacation of her second year. Though set
in the recognisably undergraduate world of pubs, junk shop dealers and
large-eyed young girls, it showed the influence of her voluminous reading
with its tale of a bizarre murder carried out by a young girl who is all
innocent sweetness on the surface and pure Webster's White Devil beneath.
This work (which later embarrassed her with its Grand Guignol excesses) was
followed by The Magic Toyshop in 1967 which dealt intriguingly with family
relationshps.
Another story strong on the mysterious and the bizarre, as well as being good
on the penumbras of human nature, this nevertheless impressed critics for
the control with which Angela Carter handled her material. Her third book,
Several Perceptions, won her a Somerset Maugham prize in 1969 and gave her
the sense of liberty which, subconsciously, she had been wanting. She and
her husband agreed to part and she used her prize money to get as far away
from Christian western Europe as she could. Her bolthole was Japan where she
worked for a spell in the English language branch of the NHK broadcasting
company and wrote Love as well as beginning The Infernal Desire Machines of
Doctor Hoffman. The first, which appeared in 1971, confirmed her as someone
who could deal authoritatively with the dark side of love, particularly of
sibling affection, and who entwined the surreal and the macabre with the
possible and the concrete in an effortless manner.
The second, which was published in the following year, did nothing for her
reputation among those who were by now really hoping to see the emergence of
a major talent. Indeed, though its educated bizarreries delighted those who
love anything modish, she herself was inclined to see it as something of a
setback for her: "It was the novel which marked the beginning of my
obscurity,'' she once remarked in an interview. "I went from being a very
promising young writer to being ignored ...'' This was something of an
exaggeration. She kept her following and in 1984 a film version of her short
story The Company of Wolves (originally published in Bananas) in 1984
brought her to a wider audience through its box office success. But as time
went by there were fears that, at 40, her best work was already behind her.
Later work such as The Passion of New Eve (1977) showed signs of succumbing
to the polemicism which she had, until that point, avoided. The publication
of her non-fiction The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (1979)
was provoking and perceptive but it did not get her further than her fiction
does into the question which is at the heart of everything she wrote (the
problem posed by Pauline Reage's Histoire d'O) namely: do women
subconsciously enjoy, if not actually invite, the sadistic treatment they so
often get from men?
From 1976 to 1978 Angela Carter was a fellow in creative writing at Sheffield
University and she later spent a year as visiting professor in the writing
programme at Brown University, Rhode Island. She had scripted (with Neil
Jordan) the film The Company of Wolves and did the same for The Magic
Toyshop, which was made into a film in 1986.
She married, secondly, Mark Pearce, and at the age of 3 she had a son. They
both survive her.
I am so glad to see Angela Carter made your list, as she is a very important writer for many women writers (and no doubt for a few men too). I feel cheated by her early death but glad to see she's not cheated by your list.
I used her in a course I taught on Women's Literature once. She was eaten up by the students who adored her reinventions in The Bloody Chamber.
A brave, adventurous writer--out in a field virtually by herself.
Elan Durham, Santa Monica, CA/US