Once upon a time, fairy tales were denounced, especially on the left. "Realistic," improving literature was the thing. But Angela Carter loved to retell such stories in her gothic, pyrotechnic prose. At university, studying English, she'd plunged into the medieval options—romances, legends, allegories—partly to avoid the finger-wagging followers of FR Leavis who, she thought, belonged to the "eat up your broccoli" school of literary analysis. She has been rewarded with posthumous fame; it is a triumph for her take on the world, a mixture of attraction and menace, like a jewel glittering in the dark.
"Red Riding Hood," "Beauty and the Beast" and similar tales were set down by Charles Perrault in his light, sophisticated 17th-century prose. Then, in the 19th century, came the bleaker versions of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Enter, in the 1970s, Angela Carter, with one of her greatest books, The Bloody Chamber (filmed as The Company of Wolves), which really isn't for tiny tots. The stories were ratcheted up: more ferocious, more perverse. This is the wolf closing in on Red Riding Hood's grandmother: "He strips off his shirt. His skin is the colour and texture of vellum. A crisp stripe of hair runs down his belly, his nipples are ripe and dark as poison fruit but he's so thin you could count the ribs under his skin if only he gave you the time. He strips off his trousers and she can see how hairy his legs are. His genitals, huge. Ah! huge.
"The last thing the old lady saw in all this world was a young man, eyes like cinders, naked as a stone, approaching her bed.
"The wolf is carnivore incarnate."
I first met Angela in the dying days of the 1960s. She walked into my Covent Garden editorial office very erect, all in black, topped with a large, floppy hat. She spoke with an odd mixture of hesitancy and point-blank self-assurance; but I couldn't entirely concentrate on what she said: dark gaps marked where two of her front teeth were missing. I never discovered why. When her eventual publisher, Carmen Callil, first met her, Angela's opening gamut was that the man she then lived with had just thrown a typewriter at her, and would she advise her to leave him?
The black thread that ties love to violence ran through all her work until she turned 40 and had a late, much-loved son; thereafter, she wrote more gently. "Sometimes, when I read my back pages," she said, "I'm quite appalled at the violence of my imagination. Before I had a family and so on." At her best she wrote with wild grace, like a dandy.
Her star continues to rise. At her untimely death of lung cancer in 1992, aged 51, the obituaries gave her better notices than any she received in her lifetime. Her books then sold out. Her last novel, Wise Children, completed in her final illness (and which the National Theatre is currently adapting for the stage), sold 80,000 copies in paperback. Last year, 13 years after her death, Wise Children sold 13,000 copies and Nights at the Circus, her other late novel, sold 3,500. Reissues continue. Her second novel, The Magic Toyshop, has never been out of print.
Born in 1940, she was a true child, she always said, of the welfare state, "all that free milk and orange juice and cod liver oil." She was strongly political but she was never a party-liner. Teaching at an Ivy League university, she was boycotted by the campus feminists. It annoyed them that, after unspeakable torments, her princesses were still permitted to marry and live fairly happily ever. Rape, in a Carter novel, is one of the things that happens, not (as radicals preferred) a symbol of the essential nature of male-female relationships. Annabel, the heroine of Love—one of a clutch of Carter books reissued by Vintage this month—models her expression on the "bland, white motionless face" of women in pornographic photos. One bout of lovemaking is described as "mutual rape." When her lover Lee seduces an older woman, he says it's "like screwing the women's page of the Guardian." For Angela, nothing was sacred.
Her writing divided into her dazzling fiction—the best of it very brief—and her pungent, uproarious essays. For much of her lifetime she was known only to a few. Many people, like the writer Helen Simpson—who spoke at a recent South Bank event called "Remembering Angela Carter"—came across her books by chance; in Simpson's case, at a jumble sale. "I couldn't find anyone who'd heard of her," she has said. "I loved the quality of the prose, so violent, so erotic."
For many years, until Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves in 1984 gave her fiction some welcome publicity, Angela was probably better known for her essays. Many of these, I'd argue, are at least as good as some of her fiction, though I acknowledge a vested interest: starting in 1967, most of them appeared in New Society magazine, which I edited. "Velvet is back, skin anti-skin, mimic nakedness," one essay on sixties style began. "Like leather and suede, only more subtly, velvet stimulates the skin it conceals…" (This essay, with others, is in my collection Arts in Society, also reissued in a new edition.) She always chose her own words with fetishistic care.
Her father was a Fleet Street journalist, her mother a former cashier at Selfridges. When the flying bombs came, she was evacuated from south London to her grandmother's house near Rotherham. The sheep on the hills, she told me, were always black. Her uncle worked in the pit; in the 1984-85 strike, she was unshakeably on Scargill's side. On the Yorkshire shelves lay three copies of Foxe's Book of Martyrs. Apart from the Bible, this used to be the only book in many non-affluent Protestant households. I've always suspected that horrific accounts of martyrdom, and even more horrific illustrations, helped shape her fiction. She always championed the Protestant work ethic, if in unexpected ways. She thought that pornography was art with a job to do.
For Carmen Callil's feminist publishing house Virago, she wrote an irony-laden tribute to the Marquis de Sade. This is The Sadeian Woman (still in print) which, as Callil observes, in magnificent understatement, "got her into a lot of trouble." Angela saw Sade's books as, among other things, a celebration of what women could get out of sex when it was untrammelled by any connection with procreation. Angela suggested to Virago that they publish Juliette, Sade's blood-curdling tale of wickedness rewarded. But they didn't.
She had written her first novel Shadow Dance (1966) in a summer vacation from Bristol University. At this time, living in a kind of west country bohemia, she modelled herself on images of 1950s Paris, garnered from favourite films like Godard's A Bout de Souffle. She then followed a lover—a Korean, I think—to Japan. Her life, till she came back to London three years later, was bizarre. The lover told her he would never forget her which (as she noted dispassionately) "is not the kind of thing one says to a person with whom one proposes to spend the rest of one's life." She worked at anything and everything; for a time she was a bar hostess on the Ginza. She said the job was "a masturbatory device for gentlemen."
The male sexual response, she wrote, "is the other side of the moon, the absolute mystery, the one thing I can never know." And, for Angela, the puzzle was reflected back in a mirror, as in a fairy tale. Not only what did the Beast see in Beauty, but what did Beauty see in the Beast?
