"Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death." -- Angela Carter
Angela Carter (May 7, 1940 — February 16, 1992) was an English novelist and journalist, known for her feminist, magical realism, picaresque and science fiction works. In 2008, The Times ranked Carter tenth, in their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
"A book is simply the container of an idea like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.""A day without an argument is like an egg without salt.""Aeneas carried his aged father on his back from the ruins of Troy and so do we all, whether we like it or not, perhaps even if we have never known them.""Anxiety is the beginning of conscience, which is the parent of the soul but is not compatible with innocence.""Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.""Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.""Hollywood... was the place where the United States perpetrated itself as a universal dream and put the dream into mass production.""I haven't changed much, over the years. I use less adjectives, now, and have a kinder heart, perhaps.""I think it's one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates.""I was sitting in the looping studio late one night, and I had this epiphany that they weren't paying me for my acting, for God's sake, but to own me. And from then on, it became clear and an awful lot easier to deal with.""If the Barbarians are destroyed, who will we then be able to blame for the bad things?""In a secular age, an authentic miracle must purport to be a hoax, in order to gain credit in the world.""In the mythic schema of all relations between men and women, man proposes, and woman is disposed of.""Is not this whole world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody.""It is far easier for a woman to lead a blameless life than it is for a man; all she has to do is to avoid sexual intercourse like the plague.""It is, perhaps, better to be valued as an object of passion than never to be valued at all.""It shone on everyone, whether they had a contract or not. The most democratic thing I'd ever seen, that California sunshine.""It's every woman's tragedy, that, after a certain age, she looks like a female impersonator. Mind you, we've known some lovely female impersonators, in our time.""Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.""My mother learned that she was carrying me at about the same time the Second World War was declared; with the family talent for magic realism, she once told me she had been to the doctor's on the very day.""Nostalgia, the vice of the aged. We watch so many old movies our memories come in monochrome.""Pornography is a satire on human pretensions.""Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.""Soon, nostalgia will be another name for Europe.""Strangers used to gather together at the cinema and sit together in the dark, like Ancient Greeks participating in the mysteries, dreaming the same dream in unison.""That is what I'm looking forward to the most, practical learning. I want to be a registered nurse so getting to talk to people who already work in those jobs can really teach me what to expect when I get out in the real world.""The bed is now as public as the dinner table and governed by the same rules of formal confrontation.""The notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick.""To pin your hopes upon the future is to consign those hopes to a hypothesis, which is to say, a nothingness. Here and now is what we must contend with.""What a joy it is to dance and sing!""What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many?""Where ambition can cover its enterprises, even to the person himself, under the appearance of principle, it is the most incurable and inflexible of passions.""You must realize that I was suffering from love and I knew him as intimately as I knew my own image in a mirror. In other words, I knew him only in relation to myself."
Born Angela Olive Stalker in Eastbourne, in 1940, Carter was evacuated as a child to live in Yorkshire with her maternal grandmother. As a teenager she battled anorexia. She began work as a journalist on the Croydon Advertiser, following in the footsteps of her father. Carter attended the University of Bristol where she studied English literature.
She married twice, first in 1960 to Paul Carter. They divorced after twelve years. In 1969 Angela Carter used the proceeds of her Somerset Maugham Award to leave her husband and relocate for two years to Tokyo, Japan, where she claims in Nothing Sacred (1982) that she "learnt what it is to be a woman and became radicalised." She wrote about her experiences there in articles for New Society and a collection of short stories, Nine Profane Pieces (1974), and evidence of her experiences in Japan can also be seen in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972).
She then explored the United States, Asia and Europe, helped by her fluency in French and German. She spent much of the late 1970s and 1980s as a writer in residence at universities, including the University of Sheffield, Brown University, the University of Adelaide, and the University of East Anglia. In 1977 Carter married Mark Pearce, with whom she had one son.
As well as being a prolific writer of fiction, Carter contributed many articles to The Guardian, The Independent and New Statesman, collected in Shaking a Leg. She adapted a number of her short stories for radio and wrote two original radio dramas on Richard Dadd and Ronald Firbank. Two of her fictions have been adapted for the silver screen: The Company of Wolves (1984) and The Magic Toyshop (1987). She was actively involved in both film adaptations, her screenplays are published in the collected dramatic writings, The Curious Room, together with her radio scripts, a libretto for an opera of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, an unproduced screenplay entitled The Christchurch Murders (based on the same true story as Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures) and other works. These neglected works, as well as her controversial television documentary, The Holy Family Album, are discussed in Charlotte Crofts' book, Anagrams of Desire (2003).
At the time of her death, Carter was embarking on a sequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre based on the later life of Jane's stepdaughter, Adčle Varens. However, only a synopsis survives.
Her novel Nights at the Circus won the 1984 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for literature.
Angela Carter died aged 51 in 1992 at her home in London after developing lung cancer. Book: Angela Carter and the fairy tale Orlando.cambridge.org Her obituary published in The Observer said, "She was the opposite of parochial. Nothing, for her, was beyond the pale: she wanted to know about everything and everyone, and every place and every word. She relished life and language hugely, and revelled in the diverse."
*The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972) aka The War of Dreams
*The Passion of New Eve (1977)
*Nights at the Circus (1984)
*Wise Children (1991)
Short fiction
*Nine Profane Pieces (1974) aka Fireworks: Nine Stories in Various Disguises and Fireworks
*The Bloody Chamber (1979)
*The Bridegroom (1983) (Uncollected short story)
*Black Venus (1985)
*American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (1993)
*Burning Your Boats (1995)
Poetry
*Five Quiet Shouters (1966)
*Unicorn (1966)
Dramatic works
*Come Unto These Yellow Sands: Four Radio Plays (1985)
*Plays, Film Scripts and an Opera (1996) (includes Carter's screenplays for adaptations of The Company of Wolves and The Magic Toyshop; also includes the contents of Come Unto These Golden Sands: Four Radio Plays)
*The Holy Family Album (1991)
Children's books
*The Donkey Prince (1970) illustrated by Eros Keith
*Miss Z, the Dark Young Lady (1970) illustrated by Eros Keith
*Comic and Curious Cats (1979) illustrated by Martin Leman
*Moonshadow (1982) illustrated by Justin Todd
*Sea-Cat and Dragon King (2000) illustrated by Eva Tatcheva
Non-fiction
*The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (1978)
*Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings (1982)
*Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings (1992)
*Shaking a Leg: Collected Journalism and Writing (1997)
She wrote two entries in "A Hundred Things Japanese" copyright 1975 by the Japan Culture Institute. ISBN 0870403648 It says "She has lived in Japan both from 1969 to 1971 and also during 1974" (p 202).
* Milne, Andrew (2006), The Bloody Chamber d'Angela Carter, Paris: Editions Le Manuscrit, Université
* Milne, Andrew (2007), Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber: A Reader's Guide, Paris: Editions Le Manuscrit Université
* Dimovitz, Scott A., 'I Was the Subject of the Sentence Written on the Mirror: Angela Carter's Short Fiction and the Unwriting of the Psychoanalytic Subject.' Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 21.1 (2010): 1-19.
* Dimovitz, Scott A., 'Angela Carter’s Narrative Chiasmus: The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and The Passion of New Eve.' Genre XVII (2009): 83-111.
* Dimovitz, Scott A., 'Cartesian Nuts: Rewriting the Platonic Androgyne in Angela Carter’s Japanese Surrealism'. FEMSPEC: An Interdisciplinary Feminist Journal, 6:2 (December 2005): 15—31.
* Kérchy, Anna (2008), Body-Texts in the Novels of Angela Carter. Writing from a Corporeagraphic Perspective. Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press
* Topping, Angela (2009), Focus on The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories London: The Greenwich Exchange
