The Invention of Angela Carter - A Biography by Edmund Gordon: book review

The Invention of Angela Carter (2016) is the biography of the British author of The Bloody Chamber (1979), Comic and Curious Cats (1979), Nights at the Circus (1984), and Wise Children (1991).

Noted for her ‘fearlessly original works’ in 2008 The Times named Carter as the 10th greatest British writer since 1945 and her novel Nights at the Circus continues to win awards – the most recent in 2012.

Angela Olive Carter (1940-1992) was a novelist and journalist of feminist, magical realism, children’s, and picaresque works.

The biography begins with her grandparents, her parents Sophia Olive and Hugh Stalker, and her upbringing as the second and last child.

The biographer Edmund Gordon, with unrestricted access to Carter’s manuscripts, letters, journals, and interviews, focuses on Carter’s literary influences, such as fantasy and fairy stories, and her first ‘astonishing’ and ‘melancholic’ poem, The Valley of the Kings, written at the age of 11: ‘…the work of a child who was increasingly isolating herself in a mental world constructed from reading and her own imagination.’ She was an ‘eccentric, self-contained girl.’

From reading came travel – travel to America, living in Japan for two years (for love) – before returning to England. Gordon juxtaposes Carter’s life, travels, marriages, motherhood, reporting career, and teaching career, with her writings.

Male and female critics described her writing as formidable, unremittingly inventive, indulgent, compelling in its own obscure way, astonishing brilliant technique, a remarkable step into the darkness, extraordinary, excessive, manic pitch, and a little bit tedious …

During the British literature resurgence of the 1980s, Carter’s name was not mentioned with Salman Rushdie, Kingsley Amis, and Ian McEwan, for reasons that may include: ‘Angela Carter was arguably too much of an individualist, her writing too wilfully unique to fit easily into the media narrative of a new trend in British fiction.’

Gordon writes of Carter’s changing looks, growing self-confidence, the ailing years, and the great fanfare for the launch of Wise Children in 1991, a few months before her death of lung cancer at the age of 51.

This biography explores Carter’s thoughts, writing, style, and life influences (the 1960s music scene and counterculture, the 1970s feminist movement, the nonconformist print media, her involvement with Virago publishing house, and her American and Australian experiences), depicting her progressive independence and self-invention. This is an interesting biography of a little known, little understood, but magnificent writer.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

Pir-E-Kamil - The Perfect Mentor by Umera Ahmed: book review

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Flaws in the Glass, a self-portrait by Patrick White: book review

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Sister cities discussed: Canberra and Islamabad

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