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).
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