Review of Angela Carter: The Bloody Chamber, Wise Children, Fireworks with Introduction by Joan Acocella (Everyman’s Library, £12.99)

In the twenty-six years since her death, Angela Carter is still being read, so it’s a surprise to read her bibliography and find that her only adult literary prize was the Somerset Maugham award, at the start of her career when she was twenty-nine. Were those prize committees right in ignoring her? Has time judged her poorly? This collection offers to counter such a suggestion with her most famous book,The Bloody Chamber, first published in 1979; her last novel, Wise Children; and the early volume Fireworks.

In amongst the differences between them, the delights to be found as we witness an artist grow and change, are the constants: one of Carter’s favourite ‘types’, the ‘wild girl’, is there in Wise Children as Estella Hazard, the grandmother of the elderly twins, Nora and Dora Chance:

‘She wore her red hair hanging down her back, a wreath of lilies of the valley, she was nineteen or thereabouts. Lamb to the slaughter, one might have said…he was a drunk, a bankrupt, a gambler, he’d fretted and philandered and beaten and betrayed three wives into early graves already. But no sacrificial lamb nor shrinking violet she. She was a wild thing…’

Estella Hazard recalls the young bride of ‘The Bloody Chamber’, as well as the girl in ‘The Company of Wolves’ (‘The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat’) and the sacrificial Gretchen of ‘Fireworks’. All virginal young heroines of fairy tales past, they sign up to their fate but less passively in Carter’s hands, laughing at the wolf. They may participate in their own subjection, they may embrace death or incest. But their dreams and their desires more powerful than anything else.

Female desire is vicious and dangerous; it is immersive but it can be ruled with a laugh. Young girls both know and don’t know their own power; in Wise Children, Carter takes as her subjects septuagenarian twin song-and-dance girls, whose real paternity has been unacknowledged throughout their lives. Dora, who relates their history, knows the limits of what a girl can do in a family where daughters are denied their rightful place, but she persists on challenging those limits just the same.

I read Wise Children when it first appeared in 1992, and thought it the weakest, most straightforward of Carter’s fiction, and felt quietly disappointed. How wrong I was. It’s a novel that has only grown in depth and realism and an earthy kind of magic, the magic of human connection, since its publication. Did Carter miss out on major prizes because she was a woman writing about women? We know, statistically, that women writers are less likely to win prizes when they write about their own gender. If Carter was aware of that, she didn’t care, writing about women until the end. This is grave yet hilarious writing; luscious yet also economic in its prose; it is real, yet fantasy. Carter may have missed out on major literary prizes, but she has won out in the contest with time.

503 words

Lesley McDowell