Even when she was 10 or 11, Angela wasn’t allowed to go to the lavatory on her own. (Not an easy thing to achieve in a decade when meat, sugar, chocolate, butter, cheese and cooking fat were all strictly rationed.)Īs she approached adolescence, her mother’s obsessive cosseting only became more pronounced. As a young girl she was spoiled and zealously sheltered by her parents, and in particular by her mother, who placed a handkerchief behind Angela’s head whenever she sat down in a public place, rubbed so much Zam-Buk ointment on her chest that her top was permanently stained green, and indulged her with so many edible treats that by the time she left primary school she was extremely overweight. Born in 1940 – just before the Luftwaffe unleashed its first wave of bombs over Britain – she grew up in the shabbily respectable south London district of Balham, the second child of an eccentric journalist father and a neurotic housewife mother. She consistently flouted expectations of women, creating instead, by sheer force of will, the lifestyle and circumstances that suited her. The story of her life is the story of how she invented herself, of how she progressed from a shy, introverted childhood, through a nervy, defiantly unconventional youth, to a happy, self-confident middle age. She wasn’t the first to make this observation – but she may have been the first to greet it so warmly, as a licence for boundless self-invention. She was explicit about viewing femininity as a “social fiction”, part of a culturally choreographed performance of selfhood. Her characters wear their personalities like fancy dress costumes. She believed that our selves are neither false nor true, but merely roles we either master or are mastered by. One of the central themes of Carter’s writing is the contingency of personal identity. “I’m in the demythologising business,” she once wrote, and as I worked on my book, my purpose increasingly became to demythologise her: to recapture the fluidity of her identity and the unpredictability of her mind, and in doing so, to tell a story about how she came to write some of the liveliest and most original books of the last hundred years. But only once her voice had been silenced was she accorded the status of a great novelist and feminist icon.Īt a time when English literature was full of sober social realists, she gave free rein to the fantastic and the surrealĪs Carter’s first biographer, a large part of my task has been trying to look beyond some of the certainties that have settled around her since her death – to see her once again as mutable, vulnerable, unfinished. She was concerned with unpicking the mythic roles and structures that underwrite our existences – in particular the various myths of gender identity – and by the end of her life she was starting to acquire a devoted following. Her work is funny, sexy, frightening and brutal, and is always shaped by a keen, subversive intelligence and a style of luxuriant beauty. At a time when English literature was dominated by sober social realists, she played with disreputable genres – gothic horror, science fiction, fairytale – and gave free rein to the fantastic and the surreal. For more than 25 years Carter had been producing novels, short stories, drama and journalism that stood defiantly apart from the work of her contemporaries. Her friends and long-term admirers regarded this torrent of posthumous acclaim with a touch of exasperation. Over the course of the next academic year, the British Academy received 40 proposals for doctoral research into her work – compared with three on the literature of the entire 18th century. “Angela Carter … was one of the most important writers at work in the English language.” “She interpreted the times for us with unrivalled penetration.” “Her imagination was one of the most dazzling of this century.” Three days after she died, Virago, the publishing house with which her name was most closely associated, sold out of her books. Her obituaries in the British press received more space than any others that year except Francis Bacon, Willy Brandt and Marlene Dietrich. When Angela Carter died – aged just 51, on 16 February 1992 – her reputation changed from cultish to canonical.
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