Not Your Fairy Godmother
The story Edmund Gordon tells in his superb new biography The Invention of Angela Carter isn’t the traditional once-upon-a-time kind, but it has a heroine as unforgettable as the ones in fairy tales.
Angela Carter was born on May 7th 1940 in Eastbourne, on the southern shore of England, the place to which her mother and older brother had been evacuated some months earlier. A few weeks later British forces were expelled from Dunkirk in France and retreated across the channel, making people realize that it had been a silly idea to flee the capital by moving closer to the front, and the family returned to London. Carter grew up there in relatively privileged circumstances, though she was oppressed by the generally stultifying atmosphere of post-war austerity and the smothering attentions of her overprotective mother. As she came of age, she developed a fierce independence; in the words of critic Joan Acocella, “she rebelled, went on a diet, and changed from a fat, obliging girl to a skinny, rude girl. She slouched around in short skirts and fishnet stockings, smoking and saying offensive things.”
For a young woman in those days the easiest escape was into marriage, and so at 20 she found an obliging partner who gave her little other than the last name under which she later made herself famous. It was during their troubled relationship that she started writing in earnest, but it was only when she abandoned him to travel to Japan that her artistic life really began. Drawing on English folklore, personal domestic experience, continental philosophy, a newly radical feminism, South American magical realism, and a touch of genius all her own, she produced a kind of fiction that no one had before.
Novels such as The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman and Nights at the Circus and story collections such as The Bloody Chamber and Burning Your Boats became staples of college syllabi in both English and women’s studies classes and favorites of the general reading public. As Carter’s fame grew (though it never reached the level she deserved) she won prestigious literary prizes, served on literary prize juries, and traveled the world teaching and writing. The cult-like devotion of her most avid followers, along with the eccentric fashion she embraced, encouraged the media to represent her as a sagacious earth mother figure, a role she ardently resisted, insisting as always on her independence. She did enter a mutually contented second marriage with a man eighteen years her junior and, at a later stage in life than most, embraced literal motherhood when she gave birth to a son in 1984.
In 1991, just after the publication of her novel Wise Children, she was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer and died less than a year later in the prime of her career at the age of 52. The loss was immeasurable, though we can get a sense of it by considering the other writers she continues to influence. Without the work she left with us we probably wouldn’t be able to read Geek Love by Katherine Dunn or The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey or Swamplandia! by Karen Russell or Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link or The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern or The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender or Tenth of December by George Saunders or Brightfellow by Rikki Ducornet.
In an alternate universe Angela Carter would even now be an elder stateswoman for literature, and there’s no telling where her muse would have taken her--or us--during the intervening years. We should be grateful to Edmund Gordon and to Oxford University Press for giving us the best road map to those imaginary lands.
--James
