Born Angela Olive Stalker in
Eastbourne, in 1940, to Sophia Olive (née Farthing; 1905–1969), a cashier at
Selfridge's, and journalist Hugh Alexander Stalker (1896–1988),[3] Carter was evacuated as a child to live in Yorkshire with her maternal grandmother.[4] After attending
Streatham and Clapham High School, in south London, she began work as a journalist on The Croydon Advertiser,[5] following in her father's footsteps. Carter attended the
University of Bristol where she studied English literature.[6][7]
She married twice, first in 1960 to Paul Carter,[5] divorcing in 1972. In 1969, she used the proceeds of her
Somerset Maugham Award to leave her husband and relocate for two years to Tokyo, where she claims in Nothing Sacred (1982) that she "learnt what it is to be a woman and became radicalised".[8] 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 met Mark Pearce, with whom she had one son and whom she married shortly before her death.[9] In 1979, both The Bloody Chamber, and her feminist essay, The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography,[10] appeared. In the essay, according to the writer
Marina Warner, Carter "deconstructs the arguments that underlie The Bloody Chamber. It's about desire and its destruction, the self-immolation of women, how women collude and connive with their condition of enslavement. She was much more independent-minded than the traditional feminist of her time."[11]
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.[12] 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 film: The Company of Wolves (1984) and The Magic Toyshop (1967). She was actively involved in both adaptations;[13] her screenplays were subsequently published in The Curious Room, a collection of her dramatic writings, including radio scripts and a libretto for an opera based on Orlando. Carter's novel Nights at the Circus won the 1984
James Tait Black Memorial Prize for literature. Her 1991 novel Wise Children offers a surreal wild ride through British theatre and music hall traditions.
Carter died aged 51 in 1992 at her home in London after developing
lung cancer.[14][15] At the time of her death, she had started work on a sequel to
Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre based on the later life of Jane's stepdaughter, Adèle Varens; only a synopsis survives.[16]
Shaking a Leg: Collected Journalism and Writing (1997)
She wrote two entries in "A Hundred Things Japanese" published in 1975 by the Japan Culture Institute.
ISBN0-87040-364-8 It says "She has lived in Japan both from 1969 to 1971 and also during 1974" (p. 202).
As editor
Wayward Girls and Wicked Women: An Anthology of Subversive Stories (1986)
The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1990) a.k.a. The Old Wives' Fairy Tale Book
The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1992) a.k.a. 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)
Crofts, Charlotte, "Curiously downbeat hybrid" or "radical retelling"? – Neil Jordan's and Angela Carter's The Company of Wolves. In Cartmell, Deborah, I. Q. Hunter, Heidi Kaye and Imelda Whelehan (eds), Sisterhoods Across the Literature Media Divide, London: Pluto Press, 1998, pp. 48–63.]
Dimovitz, Scott A. "I Was the Subject of the Sentence Written on the Mirror: Angela Carter's Short Fiction and the Unwriting of the Psychoanalytic Subject". Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 21.1 (2010): 1–19.
Dimovitz, Scott A., "Angela Carter's Narrative Chiasmus: The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and The Passion of New Eve". Genre XVII (2009): 83–111.
Dimovitz, Scott A., "Cartesian Nuts: Rewriting the Platonic Androgyne in Angela Carter's Japanese Surrealism". FEMSPEC: An Interdisciplinary Feminist Journal, 6:2 (December 2005): 15–31.
Dmytriieva, Valeriia V., "Gender Alterations in English and French Modernist 'Bluebeard' Fairytale". English Language and literature studies, 6:3. (2016): 16–20.
Wisker, Gina. "At Home all was Blood and Feathers: The Werewolf in the Kitchen - Angela Carter and Horror". In Clive Bloom (ed), Creepers: British Horror and Fantasy in the Twentieth Century. London and Boulder CO: Pluto Press, 1993, pp. 161–75.
Commemoration
English Heritage unveiled a
blue plaque at Carter's final home at 107, The Chase in
Clapham, South London in September 2019. She wrote many of her books in the sixteen years she lived at the address, as well as tutoring the young
Kazuo Ishiguro.[17]
The
British Library acquired the Angela Carter Papers in 2008, a large collection of 224 files and volumes containing manuscripts, correspondence, personal diaries, photographs, and audio cassettes.[18]
Angela Carter Close in
Brixton is named after her.[19]