by Reggie Lutz

Created on: June 26, 2010

Angela Carter was a British fiction writer and journalist best known for her fictional work in magical realism, feminism, picaresque and science fiction. She was born on May 7, 1940 in Eastbourne and died of lung cancer in London on February 16, 1992.

She was a prolific writer with an excellent sense of the surreal and absurd who was not afraid to go to dark places in her fiction. Of her nine novels, the most recognizable are The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, Nights at the Circus and Wise Children. Of her short work, a collection of short stories titled The Bloody Chamber is most well-known, possibly due to the film adaptation of The Company of Wolves.

The Bloody Chamber is my personal favorite as it re-examines fairy-tales such as Red Riding Hood or as Carter re-envisioned, The Company of Wolves. Another retold story is that of Bluebeard, or The Bloody Chamber. In these stories, the heroines are still saved, but by entirely different means. Bloody and macabre, these stories set themselves apart by championing the heroines who stray off the path or do the opposite of what they are told, rather than as cautionary tales. She manages to accomplish this while maintaining, and in my humble opinion, improving upon the sense of magic and wonder inherent in such stories. She also presents the stories with an unflinching gaze at the horrific elements which are largely glossed over in traditional retellings for children. Much of her work also holds traces of eroticism and fantasy that many writers struggle to capture. In a sense, The Bloody Chamber is a collection of stories that exemplifies all of Angela Carter's other work, and it is what I recommend as an introduction before diving into the more complex and in some cases stranger, longer works.

The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman is about mirage, and a bureaucrat's navigation through the mirages which are created by the machines mentioned in the title. The machines and their mirages are causing crime and insanity in a city which is increasingly cut off from the rest of the world. It is Desiderio's task to find and kill Dr. Hoffman and put the seige of mirage at an end.

Nights at the Circus tells the story of Fewers, a woman who was not born, but hatched by an egg and is developing wings. The wings, however, are unable to hold her aloft in true flight, though she is an aerialist in the circus. A journalist Jack Walser sees her perform one night, falls in love and follows the circus, and Fewers on a fantastical set of adventures. There have been stage adaptations of this work.

If interested in reading more about Angela Carter's life and work, Jeff Vandermeer has written a thorough and compelling article here; http://www.themodernword.com/scriptorium/carter.html

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