Reviews: Angela Carter

Web Pages: The Unofficial Angela Carter Web Page has a more complete bibliography.

Carter wrote many novels and short stories before her death in 1992. Her short stories often contained a re-telling of fables, myths and fairy tales from a gender-oriented perspective. Sometimes criticized by people who thought she offered negative depictions of women, she nevertheless created new and thought-provoking versions of many traditional stories. Me, I like her work a lot; especially her short fiction. For instance, "Wolf-Alice" in The Bloody Chamber, or her retelling of the Lizzie Borden story which I think was in Saints and Sinners. Carter could take those old fairy tales and retell them, twisting the Disney-fied versions back to their original gruesomeness and simultaneously revealing the horror and humor of the world. Like a British Flannery O'Connor on a twisted concoction of speed and acid.

--lq, 5/26/95; rev. 9/7/97.