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Summary
Summary
Angela Carter is widely considered one of the best loved and most highly acclaimed English writers of the last hundred years. She was prolific and inventive, producing an astounding range of innovative novels, short stories, screenplays, and essays that won her the admiration and respect of readers around the world, including renowned peers such as Salman Rushdie, Joyce Carol Oates, and Margaret Atwood. Dozens of books have been written about Carter's work, but only a few have considered the author's life, often as a brief prelude to criticism of her fiction. Edmund Gordon's The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography will be the first to fully explore Carter's life and career. Written with the exclusive authorization of Carter's estate, and facilitated by interviews with family and friends, as well as unrestricted access to her manuscripts and journals, the book takes readers through Carter's childhood in England, her struggling years as an apprentice writer, her breakthroughs in fiction, and her collaborations with filmmakers like the Irish director Neil Jordan. Alongside these public professional achievements, Gordon offers unique insights into Carter's private life, delving into her two marriages, her encounters with sexism, her frustrations as a university professor, and her struggle with lung cancer. Because its subject so powerfully embodied the spirit of the times, the book also provides a fresh perspective on Britain's social and cultural history in the second half of the twentieth century. It examines such topics as the 1960s counterculture, the social and imaginative conditions of the nuclear age, and the advent of second wave feminism. Angela Carter's life was as rich with incident, as vigorously modern, as unconventional, as dark, and ultimately as tragic as anything in her fiction. This sharply written narrative will be the definitive biography for years to come.
Author Notes
Edmund Gordon studied philosophy at Trinity College Dublin and English literature at University College London, and since 2011 has been a lecturer in English at King's College London. A regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books, he has also written for a variety of publications in Britain and the US, including Bookforum and The Guardian.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Few biographies are as consistently spot-on as this one of Angela Carter (1940-1992). Debut author Gordon, a lecturer in English at King's College London who was officially authorized by Carter's estate, uses a wealth of primary sources to trace the life and career of a daring, quirky, and preeminent writer of the late 20th century. As he shows, Carter, whose acclaimed works include the magic realist novel The Magic Toyshop and the retold-fairy-tale collection The Bloody Chamber, represents a distinct type in English history: a person from a modest class background whose innovative art was made possible by the country's post-WWII socialist democratic consensus. After a brief career as a journalist, Carter not only attended university for free, but was paid a stipend. Gordon's construction of Carter as a generous feminist who never lost the common touch comes alive on the page, and, beyond that, Gordon offers enough historic background to vividly evoke a mid- and late-20th-century world. This bio never flags, never condescends, and never loses its pace. One might not read this longish book in a single sitting, but it's a page-turner highly recommended to anyone looking for an entertaining and intelligent read. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Angela Carter broke the bonds of a cosseted upbringing and remade herself into one of the most creative English writers of the twentieth century. Gordon's affectionate biography re-creates her unconventional life against the tumultuous backdrop of postwar England. Carter's creative life began in earnest when she used the Somerset Maugham writer's prize to travel to Japan, alone, making her way as an author and journalist. Her marriage to an Englishman failed. After serial affairs she met the much younger Mark Pearce and had a son when she was 43; she and Pearce remained together until she died. She was friend, teacher, and mentor to writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Anne Enright, and Rick Moody. Carter drew from surrealism and magic realism, Borges and Poe, folk songs and fairy tales for her phantasmagoric fictional creations, meditations on the shifting roles humans use to define themselves. In 2012, her book Nights at the Circus was selected as the best-ever winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Gordon's biography could reintroduce Carter to a new generation of admirers.--Gwinn, Mary Ann Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A SIX-FOOT-TALL ACROBAT who claims to be the daughter of Leda and her cygnine lover, with the wings to prove it. A man who undergoes sex-change surgery in order to gestate a new messiah, created from his own sperm. A Little Red Riding Hood who willingly casts her cloak into the fire, eager to seduce a handsome hunter-turned-were wolf: "She knew she was nobody's meat." These are a few of the fantastic characters populating the fiction of Angela Carter, whom Salman Rushdie called, upon her death in 1992 at age 51, the "high sorceress" and "benevolent white witch" of English literature. All of her fiction is still in print in Britain, and "The Bloody Chamber" - a remarkable reinventing of fairy tales like "Beauty and the Beast" and "Little Red Riding Hood" - is among the Vintage Classics top-10 best sellers. One of the stories in that volume, "The Company of Wolves," was made into a popular movie by Neil Jordan. Jeanette Winterson, Ali Smith and David Mitchell are just a few of the contemporary writers who acknowledge Carter's influence. Yet Angela Carter is still little known outside her native England. And even there, she tends to be treated "as an ageold female archetype" rather than the "complicated modern writer" she truly was, Edmund Gordon argues in his sympathetic, cleareyed new biography. The problem, as he sees it, was largely Carter's attraction to "disreputable genres" like Gothic horror, science fiction and especially the fairy tale, an ancient structure she excavated and rebuilt from the bottom up. Gordon writes that while Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Martin Amis were hailed in the early 1980s as the new saviors of English literature, Carter was largely ignored by prize committees and condescended to by critics. "She knew that she was Angela Carter," Rushdie nicely puts it. "But she wouldn't have minded a few other people knowing." Carter's unconventional background - she described her family as hailing from "the bastard side of Old Father Thames" - surely also played a role in her marginalization. Born in 1940, she spent the war years at her grandmother's home in Yorkshire and grew up in working-class South London. Her father, a night editor at the Press Assocation, kept odd hours, and her only sibling was a brother 11 years her senior, which left her alone with Olive, her perversely demanding mother, for long stretches of time. Gordon calls Olive's attitude toward Angela "neurotic," but "abusive" might be a better description. She coddled her overweight young daughter with sweets and made her sit in public places with a handkerchief behind her head to ward off lice. Olive "didn't want Angie to grow up," her future sister-in-law would say, but Olive's intrusiveness went well beyond overprotection. She kept Angela awake "for company" until her husband came home from work at midnight and forced her to wash with the bathroom door open well into her teenage years. Though they never talked about sex, Angela, who later compared Olive to the mother in "Portnoy's Complaint," recalled that Olive would sniff her daughter's discarded underpants. In "The Bloody Chamber," Carter writes of "nursery fears made flesh and sinew" and that "earliest and most archaic of fears, fear of devourment." At 17, Carter rebelled. She lost weight - so much that for a time she was at least borderline anorexic - and began to dress in the flamboyant, eccentric style she would cultivate from then on: spike heels, tight skirts, "ethnic" dresses, even green lipstick. When her mother vowed to follow her to Oxford, Carter instead got a job, with her father's help, as a reporter. Her early work already shows signs of the sharply witty, strongly feminist voice of her mature years. Reviewing an early record by Marlene Dietrich, she wrote that women admire Dietrich "because she looks as if she ate men whole, for breakfast, possibly on toast." Carter would one day say that her own work "cuts like a steel blade at the base of a man's penis." But she spent the first years of her career trapped in an unhappy marriage to a folk music producer eight years her senior. In her journal, she is brilliant on her domestic miseries: "It never ends, the buggering about with dirty dishes, coal pails, ash bins, . . . I tumble, glazed & bladderful, from bed & swing into the fire-kettle-porridge-bread routine." She escaped into her writing. "I need to be extraordinary," she confided to her journal. A visit to Tokyo in 1969 brought about her sexual liberation - and the end of her marriage. Her first attempt to be unfaithful was unsuccessful: "Was it my mother rising up in my heart to thwart my desires once again?" She found fulfillment with a Japanese man, Sozo Araki, with whom she shared an apartment so tiny she later said it was "too small to write a novel in." She worked briefly in a hostess bar, which she called "the front line" of the battle between the sexes, and found that Japanese society gave her a new perspective on patriarchy: "The men in a society which systematically degrades women also become degraded." She didn't settle down again until 1974, when she met a construction worker named Mark Pearce, 15 years younger than she. They had a child in 1983, but married only in May 1991, after she was told she had lung cancer, to ensure his custodial rights after her death. Carter is marvelously quotable, and many of her most trenchant lines have to do with the relations between men and women. Rejecting Elizabeth Smart's novel "By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept," a lyrical treatment of an unhappy love affair, she wrote, "'By Grand Central Station I Tore Off His Balls' would be more like it, I should hope." But Gordon correctly takes pains to distance Carter from the radical feminism of the 1970s, arguing that her view of women was of a piece with the rest of her politics: "She never saw the oppression of women as categorically different from other forms of oppression, and believed that if femininity was a cultural construction, forcing the individual into a cramped and demeaning role, then so was masculinity." The sexually empowered woman is a dominant trope in her fiction, but she also wrote "The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography," a feminist work of criticism reinterpreting the Marquis de Sade. "My anatomy," she declared, "is only part of an infinitely complex organization, my self." Asked about her favorite women writers, she regretted not naming Dostoyevsky, "the greatest feminine writer who's ever lived . . . followed closely by Herman Melville." CARTER'S UNBRIDLED IMAGINATION reached its height in 1979 with "The Bloody Chamber," a gorgeously written volume that brings the sexual undercurrents of fairy tales to the surface. In "The Tiger's Bride," which opens with the line "My father lost me to the Beast at cards," Beauty is transformed into an animal through her erotic surrender to the Beast's tongue. A comically raunchy "Puss-in-Boots," retold with shades of "The Barber of Seville" and the commedia dell'arte, is the tale of a seduction accomplished with the aid of a trusty feline. ("Love is desire sustained by unfulfillment," the cat pronounces wisely.) The theme of insatiable desire appears again in "The Company of Wolves," in which Little Red Riding Hood is an adolescent girl who comes to realize her sexual powers. It's hard to overstate how profoundly mysterious and moving these stories are, or how radically Carter upends the familiar, creating something altogether new and strange. A judicious and diligent biographer, Gordon faces the obvious criticism that, as a man, he can't fully appreciate Carter's work. He argues convincingly that his sex shouldn't be held against him, noting that Carter "never thought of gender as the most important division between human beings," and that "almost all writing involves an act of identification" with people who are unlike oneself. Indeed, if there is a problem with this well-researched, carefully assembled book, it's not that the author is a man; it's that his approach doesn't quite measure up to his subject. If Gordon has passionate feelings about Carter's work, his utterly balanced and evenhanded treatment leaves no air for them to escape. Carter herself was so funny and stylish a writer that one wishes a few more sparks would rise from these cool pages. Thankfully, quotations from her letters and journals are plentiful. In one early journal, she repeats like a mantra André Breton's line "The marvelous alone is beautiful." She was both. ? Ruth Franklin is the author of "Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life"
Choice Review
The subject of numerous articles, interviews, and critical studies, Carter (1940-92) has been described as one of the most accomplished and influential writers in post-WW II Britain. In this compendious biography, Gordon (King's College London, UK) offers a balanced treatment that supersedes other assessments of Carter's life. Carter was often given to exaggerations about herself and her past, the wellspring from which much of her fiction derived, and Gordon attempts to separate the life from the myth. The key word in the title, "invention," applies equally to Carter's life and various personae and to her works. Gordon traces Carter's global wanderings--Japan figuring prominently in her artistic development--her various teaching assignments, and her constant writing, whether fiction or articles. The portrait that emerges is one of a complex, determined, and thoroughly iconoclastic figure, a woman whose fictions were defiantly original and ranged from science fiction to gothic, fantastic realism, and fairy tales. Gordon's research is thorough, and his insights are penetrating and sharp. Written with grace and assurance, this volume will long stand as the definitive biography of Carter. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --David W. Madden, California State University, Sacramento
Kirkus Review
The first comprehensive biography of the acclaimed British author.In his debut, Gordon (English/King's Coll. London) has done yeoman's work crafting an authorized, sensitive, and well-written biography of an ebullient writer whose " novels, short stories and journalismstood defiantly apart from the work of her contemporaries." She was largely ignored until she died (1940-1992), when the mythmaking began in earnest. Gordon focuses on how "she invented herself." His portrait of the prolific writer who described herself as a "born fabulist" travels from her "shy, introverted childhood, through a nervy, aggressively unconventional youth, to a happy, self-confident middle age." Born into a "matriarchal clan," her mother wanted to control her, but her grandmother raised her "as a tough, arrogant and pragmatic Yorkshire child." After school, Carter became a journalist and married a folk musician. College came later. Exposure to Baudelaire and Rimbaud convinced her she wanted to be a writer. After a few short stories, she wrote her first novel, Shadow Dance, in 1966. This was followed by a "malevolent fairy tale," The Magic Toyshop. These were surreal gothic/horror tales written in a baroque and arcane "style of luxuriant beauty." Reading Michael Moorcock and J.G. Ballard added science fiction to her palette, resulting in Heroes and Villains, a "post-apocalyptic fairy tale." Gordon notes that The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman, jam-packed with her social and feminist principles, showed how she could transform her "day-to-day experience into strange, hallucinatory art," and he calls the controversial The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography "a work of brilliantly sustained cultural criticism." Always the iconoclast, Carter had her supporters, like Salman Rushdie, Robert Coover, and director Neil Jordan. Gordon's narrative has a beautiful, effortless flow as he seamlessly moves back and forth from the life to the works. Expansive and lavish, this outstanding biography does much to demythologize Carter, revealing her to be a singular writer of her time. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Gordon (English, King's Coll. London) has written the first full-length biography of Angela Carter (1940-92), one of the most important English novelists of the second half of the 20th century. Carter is known, in her novels and short stories (The Magic Toyshop, "The Company of Wolves," etc.) as a writer who incorporates elements of fantasy and fairy-tale imagination in her works. Though there have been previous critical studies of her fiction (and some biographical essays), Gordon's book stands alone for its comprehensive examination. As Carter's official biographer, he was allowed full access to her papers and to interview many of her family, friends, and literary colleagues. While some exhaustive details (literary conferences attended, etc.) may be of interest only to Carter's many admirers rather than to general readers, this biography presents a vivid and comprehensive portrait of not only the writer but also the woman. Additionally, the description of the times in which she lived put her themes and concerns into broader perspective. VERDICT Highly recommended for all comprehensive -literature collections as well as for fans of Carter, who want to know more about how her personal biography influenced the themes of her fiction.-Morris Hounion, New York City Coll. of Technology, Brooklyn © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Introduction | p. xi |
| Part I | |
| 1 A matriarchal clan | p. 3 |
| 2 States of grace are always evil | p. 18 |
| 3 Flight from a closed room | p. 37 |
| 4 Just a wife | p. 52 |
| 5 A slapstick nightmare | p. 68 |
| 6 Giving the flash more substance | p. 87 |
| 7 Happiness is ego-shaped | p. 106 |
| 8 The edge of the unimaginable | p. 118 |
| 9 Vertigo | p. 137 |
| Part II | |
| 10 The dressing-up box of the heart | p. 153 |
| 11 Blueprints for new lifestyles | p. 172 |
| 12 Constructing a personality | p. 186 |
| Part III | |
| 13 Yet another foreign country | p. 203 |
| 14 Isn't the identity fragile? | p. 227 |
| 15 The silences with which the English compose intimacies | p. 250 |
| 16 The tales of terror groove | p. 265 |
| 17 No. I Lash Lady | p. 286 |
| 18 American ghosts | p. 302 |
| 19 A psychedelic Dickens | p. 320 |
| 20 Doomed to love | p. 331 |
| 21 A lifestyle of paradoxical propriety | p. 343 |
| 22 I refuse to play in tragedy | p. 360 |
| 23 Perhaps writing is a matter of life and death | p. 381 |
| 24 Call it a happy ending | p. 395 |
| 25 How sweet it was! | p. 402 |
| Epilogue | p. 416 |
| Acknowledgements | p. 422 |
| List of Illustrations | p. 425 |
| Notes | p. 427 |
| Index | p. 497 |
