The Thrill and Pain of Inventing Angela Carter

It’s impossible to know what the brilliant British writer Angela Carter would have thought of any biography of her life, let alone Edmund Gordon’s meticulous but at times exhausting The Invention of Angela Carter. The title alone might have elicited a snort, considering Carter was best-known for two books—a classic collection of feminist folktales, The Bloody Chamber, and the influential nonfiction tract The Sadeian Woman—that, in part, interrogate the way women are viewed by men. Gordon’s effort clearly comes from a place of respect and appreciation, but if it succeeds, it does so in part because his wall of detail and his attempts to fact-check Carter’s assertions provide a staid, sometimes unintentionally hilarious, frame for the raucous, unapologetic glimpses of Carter the reader receives through direct quotes from the subject.

So then, why should readers pick up a biography on her life? The obvious answer is that her work has been immensely important to second-wave feminism. But Carter is also essential because her writing remains surprising and transgressive, exemplified by the fact that even feminists today aren’t always in agreement about its meaning. Despite her lush style, Carter’s fiction shakes people up because it recalls punk rock and Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale as much as it does Shakespeare’s most elevated and mannered scenes. Carter also helped to bring Surrealism into the literary mainstream through early novels like The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman that still feel fresh and dangerous today.

Perhaps because of these unique qualities, even the popularity of, with its necessary correction on traditional gender roles, didn’t bring her as many readers as some of her contemporaries. As Gordon details, despite critical acclaim, stalwart tastemakers like the Booker Prize remained indifferent to her work; the literary critic Valentine Cunningham expressed the opinion of many when he wrote in in 1984 about Carter’s penultimate novel —that “it goes without saying that the Booker Prize judges want their heads and their critical standards examined for not putting this stunning novel on their shortlist.”