Angela Carter Biography Quotes 32 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Angela Carter, born Angela Olive Stalker on 7 May 1940 in Eastbourne, Sussex, grew up in wartime and postwar England, an environment that sharpened her appetite for stories that could transform fear into imagination. The daughter of a journalist, she learned early how language could both record and reinvent reality. After schooling in London, she worked briefly as a journalist herself for a local paper in south London, training her ear for voices and sharpening the concise, ironic edge that later colored her fiction. In her twenties she read English at the University of Bristol, where exposure to folklore, Renaissance drama, and modern theory met her already omnivorous reading habits. That mix of the scholarly and the sensational became a signature of her style.

First Books and a Literary Breakthrough
Carter married Paul Carter in her early twenties and published her first novel, Shadow Dance, in 1966. A quick succession followed: The Magic Toyshop, Several Perceptions, Heroes and Villains, and Love. These early books, set largely in a recognizably contemporary Britain, carry her fascination with the grotesque, with metamorphosis, and with the erotic currents that run beneath social order. Prizes arrived: The Magic Toyshop was widely acclaimed, and Several Perceptions brought her the Somerset Maugham Award, the prize she famously used not to travel Europe as tradition dictated but to go to Japan. That decision, both personal and artistic, marked a hinge in her career.

Japan and Reinvention
Carter lived in Tokyo between 1969 and 1971, separating from Paul Carter during this period. The encounter with a culture both alluring and alien to her upbringing overturned assumptions about gender, spectacle, and selfhood. She later described this as a time of radical unlearning. The experience fed Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces and prepared the ground for The Passion of New Eve, in which identity is unstable and desire drives bizarre acts of transformation. Japan sharpened her interest in performance, masks, and myth; it also intensified her commitment to writing as a lucid, baroque critique of patriarchy.

Fairy Tales, Feminism, and Form
In the mid-to-late 1970s Carter translated the tales of Charles Perrault, bringing a sly, lucid English to stories long dulled by piety. She also wrote The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography, a polemical study that treated the Marquis de Sade as a rigorous, if troubling, diagnostician of sexual power. These projects culminated in The Bloody Chamber, the book that made her reputation: a set of fairy-tale rewritings in which Bluebeard, Little Red Riding Hood, and Beauty and the Beast become arenas for wit, terror, and liberation. The collection positioned her at the center of debates about feminism and fantasy, and critics such as Marina Warner recognized in her a writer who renewed myth by forcing it to answer to the bruises and pleasures of real bodies.

Publishing Alliances and Collaborations
Carter forged crucial alliances in the British literary world. She worked closely with the publisher Carmen Callil, an advocate for bold women writers and founder of Virago, and she moved to Chatto & Windus as her principal home in later years. She encouraged other writers through reviews, essays, and teaching in residencies and workshops at universities in Britain, where her generosity and unsentimental advice became part of her legend. Her friendship with Salman Rushdie gave both writers an interlocutor for arguments about politics, form, and freedom of speech; he championed her fearlessness in print and in person. Carter also collaborated with the filmmaker Neil Jordan on The Company of Wolves, an adaptation of one of her Red Riding Hood stories, expanding her gothic-feminist imagination into cinema.

Masterpieces of the 1980s and Early 1990s
Nights at the Circus, published in 1984, is a high-wire feat of magic realism and historical invention, following the winged aerialist Fevvers through a carnivalesque Europe and Siberia. The novel, rich with comedy and cruelty, won major recognition and sealed Carter's standing as one of the most original stylists in English. Black Venus (also published as Saints and Strangers) explored the afterlives of historical figures in taut short fictions. Wise Children in 1991 returned to the stage with the irrepressible Chance twins, an exuberant, forgiving comedy of English theatrical life. These works balanced linguistic opulence with tight control of voice, and they made clear that Carter's art was not only transgressive but deeply humane.

Personal Life
After returning from Japan, Carter built a long partnership with Mark Pearce. They made a home in London, and in 1983 they welcomed their son, Alexander. Friends remember the warmth of that household alongside the ferocity of her work ethic. She cooked, argued, mentored, and wrote, maintaining a circle that included fellow writers, editors, and students. The people around her were essential to the circulation of ideas that fed her books: Callil's editorial intelligence, Jordan's filmic imagination, Warner's insights into myth, and Rushdie's advocacy and friendship all formed part of her working life.

Illness, Final Work, and Death
Carter was diagnosed with lung cancer in the early 1990s, an illness that she confronted with characteristic clarity and humor. Even as she underwent treatment she continued to write essays, stories, and reviews, and she assembled anthologies of folklore and fairy tales that showcased her conviction that the old stories still had teeth. She died on 16 February 1992 in London, aged fifty-one, survived by Mark Pearce and their young son. The loss was felt keenly across British letters. Friends and colleagues marked not only the end of a singular career but the disappearance of a companion who made rooms livelier and arguments sharper.

Posthumous Publications and Legacy
After her death, new collections of her stories and essays appeared, bringing together work scattered across magazines and broadcasts and introducing new generations to her range. She had already edited influential selections of fairy tales, a task that matched her lifelong project: to retrieve, revise, and re-enchant the cultural archive. Carter's legacy lies in her ability to yoke folklore to contemporary politics, to marry the voluptuous sentence to the steady analytic gaze, and to prove that fantasy can be the most exacting realism. Writers across genres cite her as a liberating force; readers return to her books for courage, mischief, and the strange sense that the world, seen properly, is stranger and more generous than we knew.

Our collection contains 32 quotes who is written by Angela, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Truth - Love - Mother - Live in the Moment.

Other people realated to Angela: Fay Godwin (Photographer)

• 1991 Wise Children (Novel)
• 1984 Nights at the Circus (Novel)
• 1979 The Bloody Chamber (Collection)
• 1977 The Passion of New Eve (Novel)
• 1972 The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (Novel)

• Wikipedia