Angela Olive Pearce, born Angela Stalker and later known as Angela Carter, was an English writer who wrote novels, short stories, poems, and articles. She is best known for her book The Bloody Chamber, published in 1979. In 1984, her short story "The Company of Wolves" was made into a film with the same title. In 2008, The Times listed Carter as number ten in their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945." In 2012, her book Nights at the Circus was chosen as the best ever winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Biography

Angela Olive Stalker was born in Eastbourne in 1940. Her mother was Sophia Olive (born Farthing in 1905 and died in 1969), who worked as a cashier at Selfridge’s. Her father was Hugh Alexander Stalker (born in 1896 and died in 1988), a journalist. As a child, Carter was moved to live in Yorkshire with her maternal grandmother during World War II.

As a child, Carter often received many treats because her mother used ration vouchers to buy them. This caused her to become very overweight. At age 11, she was not allowed to use the bathroom alone and had to wash with the bathroom door open. At 17, she began to lose weight, started dressing in a more revealing way, and took up swearing and smoking. These actions caused a disagreement with her parents. She also developed an eating disorder called anorexia.

After attending Streatham and Clapham High School in London, Carter began working as a journalist for The Croydon Advertiser, following in her father’s footsteps. She later studied English literature at the University of Bristol.

Carter married twice. Her first marriage was in 1960 to Paul Carter, and they divorced in 1972. In 1969, she used money from the Somerset Maugham Award to leave her husband and move to Tokyo for two years. She later wrote in her book Nothing Sacred (1982) that she learned about being a woman and became more extreme in her views during this time. She wrote about her experiences in Japan for New Society and in a collection of short stories called Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1974). Her time in Japan also influenced her novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972).

Carter traveled to the United States, Asia, and Europe, using her knowledge of French and German. In the late 1970s and 1980s, she worked 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, she met Mark Pearce, with whom she had a son. They married shortly before her death in 1992. In 1979, she published The Bloody Chamber and The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography. In The Bloody Chamber, she rewrote traditional fairy tales to challenge their usual meanings. In an interview in 1985, she said she was interested in how fairy tales and folklore help people understand events. Sarah Gamble later wrote that The Bloody Chamber shows Carter’s belief in connecting fairy tales to real-life situations. In The Sadeian Woman, Marina Warner said Carter examined how women sometimes accept their own oppression and how they can be more independent than other feminists of her time.

In addition to writing fiction, Carter wrote articles for The Guardian, The Independent, and New Statesman, which were later collected in Shaking a Leg. She adapted some of her short stories for radio and wrote two original radio dramas about Richard Dadd and Ronald Firbank. Two of her books were made into films: The Company of Wolves (1984) and The Magic Toyshop (1967). She helped create the films, and her screenplays were later published in The Curious Room, which also includes her radio scripts and a libretto for an opera based on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Her novel Nights at the Circus won the 1984 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for literature. Her 1991 novel Wise Children explores British theatre and music hall traditions in a surreal way.

Carter died at age 51 in 1992 in London from lung cancer. At the time of her death, she had begun writing a sequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, focusing on the later life of Jane’s stepdaughter, Adèle Varens. Only a summary of this work remains.

Works

She wrote two entries in the book A Hundred Things Japanese, which was published in 1975 by the Japan Culture Institute. The ISBN number is 0-87040-364-8. The book states that she lived in Japan from 1969 to 1971 and again in 1974 (page 202).

Commemoration

In September 2019, English Heritage placed a blue plaque at Angela Carter's last home, located at 107, The Chase in Clapham, South London. During the 16 years she lived there, she wrote many of her books and taught the young writer Kazuo Ishiguro.

In 2008, the British Library received the Angela Carter Papers, a big collection of 224 items. These include writings, letters, personal diaries, photographs, and audio cassettes.

A street called Angela Carter Close in Brixton is named after her.

In popular culture

The English rock band Wolf Alice chose its name from a short story titled "Wolf Alice," which appears in a book called The Bloody Chamber. It is said that the band's founder, Ellie Rowsell, took the story from her school library. Another English band, The New Eves, was named after a book titled The Passion of New Eve. The band members, Kate Mager and Ella Russell, were reading this book when they met at university.