HOWZAT

Having her back in these new editions is to be applauded. She left us too soon, in February 1992 — a witchy 51-year-old, her wicked talent at its peak in her final novel, Wise Children, with its twin music hall artistes old hoofers and exuberantly illegitimate heirs.

When Carter began writing in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the English novel was a staid sort of place, peopled with characters who crossed rooms or commons to steal illicit moments together or to munch roast beef and boiled veg. Carter’s characters didn’t cross rooms. Not unless there was a set of magic toys in the way, or a chandelier from which a naked woman could swing, or an operating table on which a man could have his sex changed.

Those old illicit loving moments — as in Love — took on a dark undertow of incest and later, the kind of desire that could turn women, too, into beasts. Like Fireworks, her first collection of stories that emerged out of her years in Japan, Carter’s talent, exploded — fierce, individual, edgy with the knowledge that made the writer both cultural anthropologist and magician.

Carter the anthropologist was the best kind of Freudian and blessed with what Salman Rushdie calls, in his introduction to her Collected Stories, “cold water douches of intelligence”. She looked at the customs and rituals of others, the performance of gender and sexuality, the better to see our own. She punctured the myths that attended them. There was nothing sacred for Carter, as another of her titles has it, not male power, female goodness, nor the barriers of class and taste.

The magician in her played with language and form. She was the sorceress of gothic purple, her language recondite and sometimes precious, but she punctured her own surrealist heights with a good lashing of the raunchy and demotic. It’s there in the very first stories: “Petals dropped from a red rose in a silver bowl on to the low, round, blood-coloured mahogany table with a soft, faint, exhausted sound, as of a pigeon’s fart.”

By the late Seventies, the blood had metamorphosed into the unsettling stories of The Bloody Chamber and the rites that mark women’s lives. Going back to another popular form, old wives’ and fairytales that allow magical transformations, Carter found a new public for her subversive reworkings of those folk classics that lay down our attitudes to love, marriage and family.

In her version of Bluebeard’s Castle, the sacrifical pianist bride who opens the Pandora’s box of murdered past wives is saved from her fabulously rich and hideously sensual husband by her straight-shooting mother. She lives happily and a little uncannily ever after in a ménage à trois with mum and Bluebeard’s former piano tuner.

Carter’s Little Red Riding Hood in The Company of Wolves, filmed by Neil Jordan, teaches the old wolf a thing or two about desire, and her Beauty proves rather beastlike.

In the collection Black Venus, Carter recovered more characters from the margins — Lizzie Borden, Baudelaire’s black mistress. But it was in Nights at the Circus that she found the figure who best incarnates her genius: Fevvers, hilarious, magnificent, poignant, a 6ft 2in aerial artiste, a Cockney Venus, who swears better than any barmaid and who can take flight, as the 19th century turns, to become the new woman.

Carter once noted that “desire does not so much transcend its object as ignore it completely in favour of a fantastic recreation of it”. Fevvers breaks free into what might look like liberated love. It takes a lot of magic.

If Carter is the writer’s writer, it is because she gave us permission to break free, to be bold with form and fancy, with time and history, with ideas and the political. Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Jeanette Winterson, and in the next generation Sarah Waters, Ali Smith and David Mitchell, owe her debts. It is good to have some of them providing fine introductions to these editions.

As for readers, she gave us permission to wonder and to laugh with sheer pleasure. Thank you, Angela.

Lisa Appignanesi’s latest novel is The Memory Man. She is finishing a book on Women and the Mind Doctors

Angela Carter: A life in words

THE LIFE
Born Eastbourne, Sussex, May 8, 1940. Known for post-feminist magical realism and subversive short stories. Studied English at the University of Bristol and became a journalist at the Croydon Advertiser. Went on to write novels for adults and children, short stories and plays.

THE WORK

IN HER OWN WORDS
On ambition “The most incurable and inflexible of passions.”
On reading “You bring to a novel all your experience of the world.”
On art “Good when it springs from necessity.”
On comedy “Tragedy that happens to other people.”

THE DEATH
Died from cancer, February 16, 1992. “She was the opposite of parochial. Nothing, for her, was outside the pale: she wanted to know about everything and everyone, every place, every word. She relished life and language, and revelled in the diverse.” Margaret Atwood, The Observer

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