The Folio Society are issuing a lavish, illustrated edition of Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, with dazzling artwork by Eileen Cooper of the Royal Academy – you can read an interview with the artist here.

“Nights at the Circus is her masterpiece; it’s also the most engaging and accessible of her fictions. Her earliest novels tend towards the stylised; Nights, by contrast, is a sprawling, garrulous book, a picaresque story of Rabelaisian proportions, with a suitably larger-than-life heroine: Fevvers, the winged Victorian ‘Cockney Venus’, six feet two in her stockings, with a voice like clanging dustbin lids and a face as ‘broad and oval as a meat dish’.”

Sarah Waters

Alice Vincent examines the author’s wild and tremendous legacy for Penguin Books

This week, Angela Carter would have turned 80. The author, known for novels such as Wise Children and collections of short stories including The Bloody Chamber and Fireworks, died in 1992, from lung cancer when she was 51. Carter’s work was dark and subversive, twisted and exploratory and weird. It was often termed ‘magical realism’, dealing as it did with fairy tales and anthropomorphism, inexplicable transformations between man and beast and strange, other metamorphoses. But Carter rejected that term, calling her writing ‘more realism than not.’

It’s curious to think of her being 80, a contemporary of those other grand, outspoken doyennes of literature – Toni Morrison, who died last year; Alice Munro; Margaret Atwood. One wonders if she would have a Twitter account, and what she would post on it. After all, Carter documented certain periods of her life meticulously. A letter-writer, she wrote them nearly every day while living in Japan, explaining in one of them that her ‘life had become like a cheap novel’.

Carter’s life was like something out of her books. Its documented best in The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography, written by Edmund Gordon in 2016, but a brief recap would touch upon a strange and cosseted childhood under a mother who was so protective she could barely go to the bathroom alone. Before she was out of her teens, Carter met her husband, a folk singer who gave her his surname. Within a decade, she used funds from a writing prize to abandon him and move to Tokyo, where she took in young-looking men and examined life by looking in lieu of understanding the language. It was this time, she wrote, that she started ‘my own questioning of the nature of my reality as a woman. How that social fiction of my “femininity” was created.’

‘I don’t think it is too much to say that the influence of The Bloody Chamber is everywhere now, especially in children’s fiction… If you ask me, the makers of Frozen should have put her name in the credits.’

Carter’s feminism is crucial to her legacy. She left the Seventies in a blazing, controversial trail of it, with both non-fiction work The Sadiean Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (hated by Andrea Dworkin and other second-wave feminists) and The Bloody Chamber (which became a near-instant set text).

‘Her feminism was actually much closer to that we see now than it was to many of her contemporaries,’ Gordon tells me. ‘She upset a lot of feminist writers. She didn’t believe that many differences between men and women were due to the biological fact of sexual differentiation, she thought they were societal impositions.’ I posit that her views would be intriguing in the current socio-political hot potato of trans rights, and Gordon agrees. ‘I suspect she would not agree with Germaine Greer currently.’

Gender was something that Carter made as slippery as the barriers between the real and the ethereal in her work. In The Passion of New Eve, her 1977 novel, a man becomes a woman in a dystopian America. In The Bloody Chamber, beasts are transformed into men by touch, and women into beasts by similar encounters.

‘Carter’s inversions of stories like Beauty and the Beast gave us a new folklore,’ Anne Enright tells me. The Irish author studied under Carter during her creative writing MA, but it was Carter’s books that inspired her to take the course ( ‘I have some paperbacks of Carter’s work on my shelves. When I check inside, I see that even my signature has changed – I was that young’).

‘I don’t think it is too much to say that the influence of The Bloody Chamber is everywhere now, especially in children’s fiction,’ she continues. ‘The victories of various princesses over the stupidities of their fathers and suitors were a commonplace in the picture books I read to my children, 15 years ago. They have gone altogether mainstream in the heroic princesses of Pixar and Disney. If you ask me, the makers of Frozen should have put her name in the credits.’

(read the full piece at Penguin Books)

(from The Invention of Angela Carter by Edmund Gordon)

Angela Carter and her husband, Paul, flew to New York on July 29, 1969. They arrived in the aftermath of the Stonewall riots, when the city was fractious and twitchy in the midsummer heat. A few weeks earlier, the first American troops had withdrawn from Vietnam (an outcome Angela thought was “in human terms … the single most glorious event since the abolition of slavery”), but in August the headlines were dominated by gun battles between Black Panthers and police, the bombing of the Marine Midland building on Broadway by a radical left-wing activist, and the gruesome murders perpetrated by the Manson family in Los Angeles and the Zodiac Killer in San Francisco. Angela felt that the status quo “couldn’t hold on much longer. The war had been brought home.” She found Manhattan “a very, very strange and disturbing and unpleasant and violent and terrifying place … The number of people who offered to do me violence was extraordinary.” The trip was the basis for the Expressionist portrait of New York in her novel The Passion of New Eve—it’s depicted as a society in the last stages of moral and economic collapse—which she described as “only a very slightly exaggerated picture, not of how it was in New York but of how it felt that summer.” She met one of the models for Tristessa—the novel’s transvestite leading lady—in Max’s Kansas City, the legendary nightclub in the East Village where the house band was the Velvet Underground,and the clientele was composed largely of artists, writers and musicians, including such luminaries as Andy Warhol, William Burroughs, and Patti Smith.

Angela and Paul spent three days in the city before traveling by Greyhound bus through Connecticut, Maryland, Virginia, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. Angela wrote to her friend Carole Roffe: 

Riding the buses is weird, since one sees only the Other America—the poor people, spades, Mexies, mountain men & European tourists. Everyone else is in a car or plane. Eating at bus station cafes in strange dawns, each station identifiable only by the differing postcards in the stand & the sugar lollipops labelled A Present from Knoxville … Or Phoenix or Memphis depending on the town. Black girls twisting their hair into spikes & applying the de-kinking fluid as the bus roars at 70mph through a Mississippi night, a fanfare of electrographics heralds another city.

The rush of the prose suggests something of the disorientation produced by visiting eleven states in just over a month. She hardly had time to process her impressions of one before moving on to the next. In New England, they spent a few nights sleeping in a log cabin in a redwood forest. In Virginia, they stayed with a Scottish weaver who “brewed Typhoo tea while nibbling imported shortbread & sighing for black pudding as though it were the fruits of a lost Eden”. In Arizona (“the most beautiful, barren, wild place”), they passed a Comanche village, and through the bus window Angela watched a young boy throwing stones at a wasted Chevrolet—“the only glimpse I caught in all my travels in America of the vanishing American himself.” On the Berkeley campus of the University of California, “saffron-robed figures sang and danced ‘Hare Krishna,’ to my exquisite embarrassment, and everywhere they advertised burgers—hamburgers, bullburgers, broilerburgers, every kind of burger including Murphy’s Irish Shamrockburger.” She thought that America was “like a Godard movie, like all the Godard movies playing at once,” but also “a nation entirely without voluptuousness.” It was an ambivalence that stayed with her, though she returned to the country several times. At the very end of her life—having lived for periods in Texas, Iowa, Rhode Island, and New York State—she wrote: “I think of the United States with awe and sadness, that the country has never, ever quite reneged on the beautiful promise inscribed on the Statue of Liberty … and yet has fucked so much up.”

The only constant was her traveling companion. But Paul isn’t mentioned in either of the short pieces of journalism she wrote about the trip (for BBC Radio 3 and the Author), or in the journal entries she made while they were there, or even in her letters to Carole. It’s an eloquent omission, as her later descriptions of the journey make clear. The narrator of “The Quilt Maker” recalls traveling by bus around the USA, “somewhere along my thirtieth year,” in the company of “a man who was then my husband.” At the bus station in Houston, Texas, she asks him for money (“he used to carry about all our money for us because he did not trust me with it”) to buy a peach from a vending machine. There are two peaches available in separate compartments of the machine, and she selects the smaller one; he teases her about this instinctive self-denial. “If the man who was then my husband had not told me I was a fool to take the little peach,” she says, “then I would never have left him, for in truth, he was, in a manner of speaking, always the little peach to me.”

Even so, she hadn’t finally decided on leaving Paul when, on September 3, they boarded separate flights at San Francisco Airport. It’s clear from subsequent letters that they parted on good terms: there had been no dramatic bust-up, and the plan was still for her to return to Bristol in late October. Neither of them imagined that it would be their last moment together as a married couple.