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 Margaret Atwood, Anne Enright, and Salman Rushdie.
Works of Angela Carter:
Tropes in her works include:
- All Girls Want Bad Boys: Most prominent in some tales in The Bloody Chamber and The Magic Toyshop.
- Color Motifs: Some of the tales in The Bloody Chamber have particular colors symbolically representing aspects of a character, more often sexually.
- Double Standard: Rape, Male on Male: 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 Character Development.
- Feminist Fantasy: The Passion of New Eve and The Bloody Chamber have this.
- Also Carter wrote the Essay The Sadeian Woman were she described the works of Marquis de Sade as the first to present women as more than just to have children.
- Grimmification: The Bloody Chamber retells various fairy tales, making them (even) darker.
- Mythpunk
- Postmodernism
- Purple Prose: Carter is not afraid to show her erudition.
- Wham Line: The last sentence of "Lizzie's Tiger.""What are they Canucks doing with little Lizzie Borden?"
- You Sexy Beast: In the The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, some centaurs get extremely intimate with both the hero and his lover Albertina.
