She had had some terrible moments of distress – she told Mark that she had been invaded by aliens – but a large part of her illness had been peaceful, and she had taken command of the organisation of her funeral, leaving precise instructions about who was to be there, what music should be played and what might be read. First, you see the stiletto-heeled shoe then the ankle with the chain around it, then the legs and the full, rich shine of her stockings. I’m quite pleased with it actually. She was on steroids and morphine; her face looked rosy and round and smooth. She did not write down gossip (though she liked gossip), and wrote little about her friends. I was looking at it again last week. It’s something that’s easy to fall into. “I decided I’d be thin and it all got completely out of hand.” It happened very quickly. AK: In the short story “The Loves of Lady Purple” you say, “she [woman] could not escape the tautological paradox in which she was trapped; had the marionette all the time parodied the living or was she, now living, to parody her own performance as a marionette?” How does this apply to women in general, and more specifically, to the woman writer? Mixed in with my numbness was a peculiar sense of gratitude that there was something new she could say to me still. Chaired by Di Speirs, BBC Radio 4 Editor, Readings. RC I wanted to ask you about mythology in general and its place in your work. Is that a feeling you share? Her early death sent her reputation soaring. Michael Berkeley, composer, broadcaster and friend, was the compere. Carmen Callil spoke about her friend. She made, again and again, lists of books and lists of films (Jean-Luc Godard featured frequently). “I’m one of the judges,” Angela explained, leaning away from her interrogator with a grimly polite chuckle. I was born in 1940. What I used to do before I wrote a movie and became successful was to organise my life so that I would save up in order to write a novel. A Conversation with Angela Carter. T o cite this article: Hera Cook (2014) Angela Carter's ‘The Sadeian W oman’ and Female Desire in England 1960–1975, Women's History R eview , 23:6, 938-956, DOI: 10.1080/09612025.2014.906840 It took me about three years to work out why this was. So when I was a girl I made a conscious effort to make the male characters as credible as I possibly could and to write sometimes in the first person, male. That novel is set at exactly the moment in European history when things began to change. She was not neglected and rarely had anything rejected; she was given solo reviews and launch parties; she went on television; she got cornered by fans. Societies have never placed a very high value on the reproductive capacity of their women. That was ages ago, over ten years ago, when I wrote that. I made the great cross-country trip Americans always say they want to make. Gothic imagery permeates all of her work but nowhere more so than in The Bloody Chamber (1979), a collection of tales that delights in moonlit forests, graveyards, isolated castles, locked rooms, guttering candles and the howling of wolves in the night. The conversation takes in a variety of topics, including Carter's reputation in North America, the relationship between her private life and… She had gone off with a Japanese man, a “very good-looking bastard… just what I needed after nine years of marriage”, and it changed her. Angela herself did not eat cakes. One of her postcards suggests something of this teenage shape-shifting. The film Alphaville uses one of the greatest gangster heroes of French cinema, but it projects a sort of trench-coat, Philip Marlowe character into some sort of antiseptic city of the future, and I really think that he was meaning myth in the terms of somebody like Bogart or Philip Marlowe. In 1969, when she had published three novels and been married to Paul Carter for some eight years, she won the Somerset Maugham award for Several Perceptions. They can’t carry all that much freight of meaning. The last time I saw her, in January 1992, she was in bed, with light belting in from the windows and the smell of incense, given her by her next-door neighbour, filling the room. In an interview Angela Carter gave in 1991, not long before her death from lung cancer at the age of 51, she can be heard struggling with being called … The students on it are very highly selected, are extremely highly motivated. The atmosphere was so permeated with the Republican virtues. That is so wonderful. AC: I was much younger when I wrote that. And therefore you can project upon her Mrs Thatcher or the Pope. Let me put it like this. It will be a television movie, at least initially, and so, of course, the budget is much lower than it was for Company of Wolves. ?” It is the reference to Marianne Wiggins that dates the card. I’m a Freudian, in that sense, and some others, too. One of my students wanted to write about a pregnant woman and I said ‘have you ever felt seasick?’ and he said ‘well, yes’. AC: It’s not very pleasant for women to find out about how they are represented in the world. She knew what it was to make a voice distinctive – as a schoolgirl she had wanted to act – and her own tones were unmistakable. I’m also interested in human beings’ projections upon animals of negative qualities, which very often the animals don’t have. But it’s very difficult knowing where to start because a certain kind of bland quietism seems to have taken over the intelligentsia. They can’t be all that, unless you can try very hard and make them move out of character a lot. In a few years’ time it will be harder to know which is random, which is allusive. Although she was a generous dolloper-out of food, her eating habits had been, for a large part of her life, irregular and sometimes dangerous. Twenty years ago I went for the first time into Angela Carter’s study. “This mincing and finicking obsession with food opens up whole new areas of potential social shame. Brief highlights from an interview of Angela Carter by Lisa Appignanesi. I looked at the story again because I used it in an anthology I did a couple of years ago. The stories are dreamlike in structure and share other qualities with dreams—symbolic transformations, ritualistic, referent use of name and language, and the fulfillment of unexpressed, or even denied, desire. I don’t think that Alexander has a greater effect on me necessarily. English Heritage has commemorated the legacy of award winning novelist Angela Carter with a blue plaque at her former home in Clapham. Rebecca Howard talked; so did Caryl Phillips. It’s part of the task to understand things. Her name flew high, like the trapeze-artist heroine of Nights at the Circus: Fevvers, the “Cockney Venus”. I’m interested in justice, really. And then it turns out it’s no good. Until the ending which I couldn’t believe—I was so upset, I said, “You’ve ruined it.” He was apologetic. RC Women writers frequently adopt a tone or an attitude toward their female characters which is somewhat negative and ungenerous. On the back of the scene of island vegetation she had painted Angela’s choice of luxury. When I went to the screening I sat with Neil and I was enjoying the film very much and thinking that it had turned out so well—just as I had hoped. He said it was related to an increasing awareness on his part of the extent to which his prose had always been affected by cinema. They find out much more about what their real existential status is from pornography, and it’s very unpleasant. But Legend gives it a form by which it pervades the whole world.”] In these times myth gives history shape. I look at them now with the idea that they evoke some of the occasions, preoccupations and delights of Angela’s life. In the course of our conversation, we discuss Rosie's recent trip to the British Library to look through the Angela Carter Papers, her perspective on… Each is decorously clad in early 20th-century mode. She was 51 and had been suffering from lung cancer for over a year. He is amazingly busy all the time, and that is hard work. They are extraordinary. Her body elongates beautifully and she does a perfect swan dive into the floorboards which turn into the surface of a body of water that swallows her. The revelation for me in the journals was that, in her 20s, Angela had written poems – verses that strikingly prefigured her novels in richness of expression, in their salty relish, in their feminism and in their use of fable. We talked about our young sons; we sized up the company around us; and we made one sexually loaded comment after another, each of us trying, like comedians in the spotlight, to get the last laugh. My mother would stay with my grandmother and I for a few weeks and then commute to London to be with my father and then return to us. She noted that the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe had died of a burst bladder because he had not dared to get up from a banquet to have a pee. Angela Carter’s 1979 collection of original fairy tales, The Bloody Chamber, is rightly held up as a masterpiece of 20th-century fiction.Dazzlingly varied in tone and register, the collection is cavalier, lushly romantic, chilling and ferociously entertaining. SW4. Right now, Granada Television is making a film based on another work of mine, my second novel, The Magic Toyshop. They tried covering the floor with water, but that didn’t work and she couldn’t just dive into the floor. I can’t answer the question because I haven’t actually done very much work since he was born. The whole trip only lasted six days but it was quite an experience. A week later I returned home to a stack of unread newspapers and very sorrowful news; while I had been struggling with moguls, Carter had succumbed to cancer. RC I think men frequently have the mistaken belief that women are screaming in pleasure rather than in terror. It is associated with the embarrassing, with the quaint. But moral pornographer was a phrase that got me into a lot of trouble with the sisters, some of the sisters. (It was done on what we call Radio Three, an art channel, which uses a lot of material from BBC Radio and World Service that you don’t get here.) He sat on a podium with a cassette machine in front of a folding screen, which Corinna had painted with tropical verdure. “I became a feminist when I realised I could have been having all this instead of being married.”, In Japan she became enthusiastic about sex. A life of which, as she put it, “The fin has come a little early this siècle.”. In the middle of it, a poster of Wise Children which had been stuck up at one side of the stage came loose and fluttered down. Is that accurate? Brief highlights from an interview of Angela Carter by Lisa Appignanesi. The point seemed to be the here and now, what we should do now. I suppose I do what I tell writing students: I occasionally get a young man sidling up to me and saying that he was very nervous about writing even the character of a woman, about making female characters, these days, because he thinks that we’re all going to stand around hitting him with our handbags. You know she is going to be a femme fatale long before you even see her face. An exciting new event celebrating Angela Carter’s Bristol connections will be taking place on Saturday 14th November. We went from New York to San Francisco, by way of New Orleans because we were both fond of the jazz music from there. She became anorexic. RC One of the themes that recurs is concerned with a sort of cataclysmic upheaval in childhood. Among her most, ( by Rosemary Carroll from Bomb — Artists in Conversation) Angela Carter is a British novelist and short story writer, By Anna Katsavos (From “The Review of Contemporary Fiction,” Fall 1994, Vol. I’m sure Somerset Maugham would have been very pleased.”, She ran to Japan, the only country that met her stringent criteria for a bolthole: she wanted to live in a non-Judaeo-Christian culture, but it had to be a culture with a good sewage and transport system. I’m glad. I keep remembering J G Ballard, who is a single parent, saying how terrific it was that he’s a writer because it meant that he could look after the children as well as earning a living. Angela Carter Actually, we like it a lot. And I said ‘well, there you go.’ If you start off everyday, except when you were lying down, seasick, you’d start realising what it’s like. And they’re very precisely located. Her mother indicated that if her daughter got a place at Oxford, she and her husband would be likely to get a flat or house nearby: “I think that’s when I gave up working for my A levels,” Angela explained. It was as though a door had opened into hell. . There is a suggestion that this denigration is connected with the fact that the reproductive aspect of female sexuality was completely devalued in Sade’s culture. 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