Angela Carter: Wikis

  
  

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Born Angela Carter
7 May 1940(1940-05-07)
Eastbourne, England
Died 3 April 1992 (aged 51)
London, England
Occupation Novelist
Nationality British
Genres Science fiction
magical realism

Angela Carter (7 May 1940 – 16 February 1992) was an English novelist and journalist, known for her feminist, magical realism, picaresque and science fiction works. In 2008, The Times ranked Carter tenth, in their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".[1]

Contents

Biography

Born Angela Olive Stalker in Eastbourne, in 1940, Carter was evacuated as a child to live in Yorkshire with her maternal grandmother. As a teenager she battled anorexia. She began work as a journalist on the Croydon Advertiser, following in the footsteps of her father. Carter attended the University of Bristol where she studied English literature.

She married twice, first in 1960 to Paul Carter. They divorced after twelve years. In 1969 Angela Carter used the proceeds of her Somerset Maugham Award to leave her husband and relocate for two years to Tokyo, Japan, where she claims in Nothing Sacred (1982) that she "learnt what it is to be a woman and became radicalised." She wrote about her experiences there in articles for New Society and a collection of short stories, Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1974), and evidence of her experiences in Japan can also be seen in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972).

She then explored the United States, Asia and Europe, helped by her fluency in French and German. She spent much of the late 1970s and 1980s 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 Carter married Mark Pearce, with whom she had one son.

As well as being a prolific writer of fiction, Carter contributed many articles to The Guardian, The Independent and New Statesman, collected in Shaking a Leg. She adapted a number of her short stories for radio and wrote two original radio dramas on Richard Dadd and Ronald Firbank. Two of her fictions have been adapted for the silver screen: The Company of Wolves (1984) and The Magic Toyshop (1987). She was actively involved in both film adaptations, her screenplays are published in the collected dramatic writings, The Curious Room, together with her radio scripts, a libretto for an opera of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, an unproduced screenplay entitled The Christchurch Murders (based on the same true story as Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures) and other works. These neglected works, as well as her controversial television documentary, The Holy Family Album, are discussed in Charlotte Crofts' book, Anagrams of Desire (2003).

At the time of her death, Carter was embarking on a sequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre based on the later life of Jane's stepdaughter, Adèle Varens. However, only a synopsis survives.[2]

Her novel Nights at the Circus won the 1984 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for literature.

Angela Carter died aged 51 in 1992 at her home in London after developing lung cancer.[3][4] Her obituary published in The Observer said, "She was the opposite of parochial. Nothing, for her, was outside the pale: she wanted to know about everything and everyone, and every place and every word. She relished life and language hugely, and revelled in the diverse."[citation needed]

Works as author

Novels

Short fiction

  • Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1974) aka Fireworks: Nine Stories in Various Disguises and Fireworks
  • The Bloody Chamber (1979)

Poetry

  • Five Quiet Shouters (1966)
  • Unicorn (1966)

Dramatic works

Children's books

  • The Donkey Prince (1970) illustrated by Eros Keith
  • Miss Z, the Dark Young Lady (1970) illustrated by Eros Keith
  • Comic and Curious Cats (1979) illustrated by Martin Leman
  • The Music People (1980) with Leslie Carter
  • Moonshadow (1982) illustrated by Justin Todd
  • Sea-Cat and Dragon King (2000) illustrated by Eva Tatcheva

Non-fiction

  • The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (1978)
  • Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings (1982)
  • Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings (1992)
  • Shaking a Leg: Collected Journalism and Writing (1997)

Works as editor

  • Wayward Girls and Wicked Women: An Anthology of Subversive Stories (1986)
  • The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1990) aka The Old Wives' Fairy Tale Book
  • The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1992) aka Strange Things Still Sometimes Happen: Fairy Tales From Around the World (1993)
  • Angela Carter's Book of Fairy Tales (2005) (collects the two Virago Books above)

Works as translator

  • The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (1977)
  • Sleeping Beauty and Other Favourite Fairy Tales (1982) (Perrault stories and two Madame Leprince de Beaumont stories)

Film adaptations

Works on Angela Carter

References

  1. ^ The 50 greatest British writers since 1945. 5 January 2008. The Times. Retrieved on 2010-03-05.
  2. ^ Theatre: Nights at the Circus | Stage | The Observer
  3. ^ Book: Angela Carter and the fairy tale
  4. ^ Orlando.cambridge.org

External links


Quotes

Up to date as of January 14, 2010

From Wikiquote

Angela Carter (May 7, 1940February 16, 1992) was an English novelist and journalist, known for her post-feminist magical realist and science fiction works.

Sourced

  • Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.
    • Vintage (1992)
  • Aeneas carried his aged father on his back from the ruins of Troy and so do we all, whether we like it or not, perhaps even if we have never known them.
    • Virago (1992)
  • A book is simply the container of an idea—like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.
    • Vintage (1992)
  • Throwing open the door, she brings forth the veritable queen of all the souffles, that spreads its archangelic wings over the entire kitchen as it leaps upwards from the dish in which the force of gravity alone confines it.
    • The Kitchen Child (1976)
  • Women's sexy underwear is a minor but significant growth industry of late-twentieth-century Britain in the twilight of capitalism.
    • The Bridled Sweeties (1977)
  • My work cuts like a steel blade at the base of a man's penis.
    • Response to a Brown student's question in her writing class, quoted by Louis Menand in the New Yorker, June 8-15, 2009, p. 112.

Unsourced

  • Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.

External links

Wikipedia
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