Novel: Wise Children

Overview

Angela Carter's Wise Children is a raucous, affectionate, and elegiac novel that celebrates theatre, illegitimacy, and the stubborn vitality of performers. Told in the warm, roguish voice of Dora Chance, it traces the intertwined histories of two London theatrical dynasties, the respectable Hazards and the scandal-tipped Chances, across much of the twentieth century. The book oscillates between comic set pieces and bittersweet reflection, staging both the pleasures and the cruelties of show business with operatic gusto.
Carter uses the music-hall and variety world as both setting and metaphor, turning life into performance and performance into a way of understanding class, family, and identity. The narrative is at once a family chronicle, a paean to the stage, and an act of storytelling that delights in doubles, disguises, and theatrical artifice.

Plot

Dora Chance, a veteran chorus girl, looks back on a life spent in skirts and spotlights alongside her twin sister Nora. Raised as "illegitimate" and therefore scorned by polite society, the Chances become fixtures of the music-hall circuit while the Hazards maintain a dignified, aristocratic theatrical reputation. Generations of theatrical triumphs, scandals, estrangements, and reconciliations ripple through both families, and Dora's narrative stitches these episodes together with humor and tenderness.
Key episodes include backstage gossip, onstage disasters, secret romances, and the slow unravelling and reknitting of family bonds. Dora recounts betrayals and reconciliations without rancor, celebrating the resilience of performers who survive on applause, wit, and a refusal to be shamed by birth or age. The story builds toward a reckoning that is less an expose than a family reunion, in which histories are aired and affection ultimately prevails.

Characters and relationships

Dora is the novel's beating heart: candid, earthy, and marvelously candid about sex, luck, and devotion to the stage. Nora, her twin, provides a counterpoint of steadier temperament and complementary loyalty. The Hazards represent the other half of the mirror: a family steeped in pedigree and theatrical grandiosity, at once alluring and remote.
Rather than presenting villains, Carter sketches a constellation of flawed, charismatic performers, managers, star actors, aging divas, whose ambitions and vanities fuel much of the drama. Family ties are complicated by secrets and social snobbery, yet the novel treats kinship through the lens of theatrical community, where a shared profession often substitutes for blood.

Themes

Legitimacy, performance, and the body as site of pleasure and shame run through the novel. Being "legitimate" proves an unreliable measure of worth; Dora and Nora's vitality undermines society's moral calculations. Doubles and twins dramatize questions of identity and inheritance, while the theatre becomes a liberating world where gender and class norms can be mocked, inverted, and reimagined.
Carter also grapples with aging and mortality, balancing brisk comedy with melancholy. The book insists on the redemptive power of laughter and song, framing the stage as both refuge and crucible where lives are dramatized, revised, and, ultimately, celebrated.

Style and tone

Lush, playful, and occasionally bawdy, the prose blends high literary sensibility with vaudeville relish. Carter's language is richly imagistic and peppered with theatrical metaphors, puns, and echoes of Shakespeare and popular song. Narrative voice is intimate and performative, as if Dora were addressing an audience whom she trusts and teases in equal measure.
The novel's tone moves effortlessly between farce and elegy, making room for carnivalesque humor alongside poignant reflections. The result is a baroque, humane fable about storytelling itself, how performance shapes identity and how, in the end, family and theatre sustain one another.

Closing

Wise Children closes as a celebration of survival through art, affirming the dignity of those who live by showmanship and solidarity. It is a final, generous hurrah for music-hall culture and for characters who refuse the hum of bourgeois respectability, insisting instead on being seen, heard, and loved for who they are.