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Black Venus by Angela Carter. London. 1985. Chatto & Windus/Hogarth Press. hardcover. 121 pages. Jacket design by Don Macpherson. 0701139641.

 

 

0701139641FROM THE PUBLISHER -

 

 

   Extraordinary and diverse people inhabit this rich, ripe, occasionally raucous collection of short stories. Some are based on real people - Jeanne Duval, Baudelaire’s handsome and reluctant muse who never asked to be called the Black Venus, trapped in the terminal ennui of the poet’s passion, snatching at a little lifesaving respectability against all odds. Edgar Allen Poe, with his face of a tragic actor, demonstrating in every thought and deed how right his friends were when they said ‘No man is safe who drinks before breakfast.’ And Lizzie Borden, lying in bed one hot summer’s night in a turn-of-the-century New England mill town, dreaming about parricide. And some of these people are totally imaginary. Such as the seventeenth century whore, transported to Virginia for thieving, who turns into a good woman in spite of herself among the Indians, who have nothing worth stealing. And a girl, suckled by wolves, strange and indifferent as nature, who will not tolerate returning to humanity. To say nothing of the ‘infant prodigy of the pans’, the child chef who teaches himself French from cookery books (‘A for asperges. And one of them - ‘Call me the Golden Herm’ - takes off from a clue about the ambiguous nature of the changeling prince in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ who causes so much trouble between Oberon and Titania. Angela Carter wonderfully mingles history, fiction, invention, literary criticism, high drama and low comedy in a glorious collection of stories as full of contradictions and surprises as life itself. Angela Carter was born in 1940. She read English at Bristol University, spent two years living in Japan and from 1976-8 was a Fellow in Creative Writing at Sheffield University. She was visiting professor in the Writing Programme at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, in 1980-81, and writer in residence at the University of Adelaide, South Australia, in 1984. Her first novel, SHADOW DANCE, was published in 1965, to be followed by THE MAGIC TOYSHOP (1967, John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), SEVERAL PERCEPTIONS (1968, Somerset Maugham Award), HEROES AND VILLAINS (1969), LOVE (1971), THE INFERNAL DESIRE MACHINES OF DR HOFFMAN (1972), THE PASSION OF NEW EVE (1977) and NIGHTS AT THE CIRCUS (1984). Angela Carter has also published two collections of stories, Fireworks (1974) and THE BLOODY CHAMBER (1979, Cheltenham Festival of Literature Award); and two works of non-fiction, THE SADEIAN WOMAN: AN EXERCISE IN CULTURAL HISTORY (1979) AND NOTHING SACRED (1982), a collection of her journalism from New Society and elsewhere. She also wrote, with Neil Jordan, the script for the film The Company of Wolves (1984).

 

 

Carter AngelaAngela Carter (7 May 1940 – 16 February 1992) was an English novelist and journalist, known for her feminist, magical realism, picaresque and science fiction works. In 2008, The Times ranked Carter tenth, in their list of ‘The 50 greatest British writers since 1945’ Born Angela Olive Stalker in Eastbourne, in 1940, Carter was evacuated as a child to live in Yorkshire with her maternal grandmother. As a teenager she battled anorexia. She began work as a journalist on the Croydon Advertiser, following in the footsteps of her father. Carter attended the University of Bristol where she studied English literature. She married twice, first in 1960 to Paul Carter. They divorced after twelve years. In 1969 Angela Carter used the proceeds of her Somerset Maugham Award to leave her husband and relocate for two years to Tokyo, Japan, where she claims in NOTHING SACRED (1982) that she ‘learnt what it is to be a woman and became radicalised.’ She wrote about her experiences there in articles for New Society and a collection of short stories, FIREWORKS: NINE PROFANE PIECES (1974), and evidence of her experiences in Japan can also be seen in THE INFERNAL DESIRE MACHINES OF DOCTOR HOFFMAN (1972). She then explored the United States, Asia and Europe, helped by her fluency in French and German. She spent much of the late 1970s and 1980s as a writer in residence at universities, including the University of Sheffield, Brown University, the University of Adelaide, and the University of East Anglia. In 1977 Carter married Mark Pearce, with whom she had one son. As well as being a prolific writer of fiction, Carter contributed many articles to The Guardian, The Independent and New Statesman, collected in SHAKING A LEG. She adapted a number of her short stories for radio and wrote two original radio dramas on Richard Dadd and Ronald Firbank. Two of her fictions have been adapted for the silver screen: The Company of Wolves (1984) and THE MAGIC TOYSHOP (1987). She was actively involved in both film adaptations, her screenplays are published in the collected dramatic writings, The Curious Room, together with her radio scripts, a libretto for an opera of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, an unproduced screenplay entitled The Christchurch Murders (based on the same true story as Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures) and other works. These neglected works, as well as her controversial television documentary, The Holy Family Album, are discussed in Charlotte Crofts' book, Anagrams of Desire (2003). Her novel NIGHTS AT THE CIRCUS won the 1984 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for literature. At the time of her death, Carter was embarking on a sequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre based on the later life of Jane's stepdaughter, Adèle Varens. However, only a synopsis survives. Angela Carter died aged 51 in 1992 at her home in London after developing lung cancer.


 

 

 


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