[[quoteright:651:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/angela_04.png]]
[[caption-width-right:651:“She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening.”]]

Angela Olive Carter-Pearce (née Stalker; 7 May 1940 – 16 February 1992) was a British fiction writer and feminist scholar.

Born to working-class parents, Angela displayed a talent for writing from an early age. After marrying her first husband and attending the University of Bristol, her work started getting published and she won the Somerset Maugham Award. With the income from that, she divorced her husband and moved to Japan, where, in her own words, she "learned what it is to be a woman and was radicalized".

When she returned Britain, she kept a bit of Japan with her, her experiences there shaping ''The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman'' and ''Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces''. After remarrying and working as a teacher, she wrote ''The Bloody Chamber''. Its success lead her to become a full-time writer.

She died of cancer in 1992 at the age of 51.

The BBC produced a documentary on her life in 2018, ''Angela Carter: Of Women and Wolves,'' about her life and works, featuring Creator/MargaretAtwood, Anne Enright, and Creator/SalmanRushdie.

!! Works of Angela Carter:
* ''Literature/TheMagicToyshop''
* ''Literature/ThePassionOfNewEve''
* ''Literature/TheBloodyChamber''
* ''Literature/NightsAtTheCircus''
* ''Literature/WiseChildren''
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!! Tropes in her works include:
* AllGirlsWantBadBoys: Most prominent in some tales in ''The Bloody Chamber'' and ''The Magic Toyshop''.
* ColorMotifs: Some of the tales in ''The Bloody Chamber'' have particular colors symbolically representing aspects of a character, more often sexually.
* DoubleStandardRapeMaleOnMale: The hero of ''The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman'' is repeatedly sodomised by an entire all-male circus troupe until he barely knows who he is. Being a Carter story, this is presented as just another part of the hero's CharacterDevelopment.
* FeministFantasy: ''Literature/ThePassionOfNewEve'' and ''Literature/TheBloodyChamber'' have this.
** Carter also wrote a reappraisial of Creator/MarquisDeSade's works, ''The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography'' were she argued that Sade was the first author to break completely from presenting women as potential vessels to produce more children for society.
* {{Grimmification}}: ''The Bloody Chamber'' retells various fairy tales, making them (even) darker.
* MagicalRealism: ''Nights at the Circus'' is frequently described as a prominent example of the genre, despite Carter believing that the genre was essentially a Central American movement.
* {{Postmodernism}}: Her work was thematically focused on deconstructing traditional narratives, such as power, sexuality and the role of women in fairy tales.
* PurpleProse: Carter is not afraid to [[ViewersAreGeniuses show her erudition]].
* WhamLine: The last sentence of "Lizzie's Tiger."
-->"What are they Canucks doing with little [[spoiler:Lizzie Borden]]?"
* YouSexyBeast: In the ''The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman'', some centaurs get extremely intimate with both the hero and his lover Albertina.
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