Angela (Olive) Carter (1940-1992)
English short story writer, novelist, journalist, dramatist and critic, representantive of magic realism added with Gothic themes, violence, and eroticism. Carter utilized throughout her career the language and characteristic motifs of the fantasy genre to dramatize her sense that the old orders of the Western world were breaking down. Her work represents a successful combination of postmodern literary theories and feminist politics. "-Then the city vanished; it ceased, almost immediately, to be a magic and appalling place. I woke up one morning and found it had become a home. Though I still turn up my coat collar in a lonely way and am always looking at myself in mirrors, they're only habits and give no clue at all to my character, whatever that is. --The most difficult performance in the world is acting naturally, isn't it? Everything else is artful." (from 'Flesh and the Mirror' in Fireworks, 1974)
Carter was born in Eastbourne, Sussex as the daughter of a journalist. She was removed by her grandmother to South Yorkshire during the war years. After rejoining again her mother she suffered from anorexia. At 20 she got married and before starting her English studies at the University of Bristol, Carter worked for the Croydon Advertiser and wrote features and record reviews. After graduating, she settled in the city of Bristol and began her literary career. "A good writer can make you believe time stands still."
Her first novel, SHADOW DANCE, Carter published in 1966. It was a kind of detective story and introduced her charasteristic interrogation of sexuality. THE MAGIC TOYSHOP (1967) developed further the themes of sexual fantasy and revealed Carter's fascination with fairy tales and the Freaudian unconscious. It told a modern myth of an orphaned girl who has the horrors when she goes to live with her uncle and grows through a rite of passage into adulthood. The book won the Jon Llwellyn Rhys Prize in 1967. THE INFERNAL DESIRE MACHINES OF DOCTOR HOFFMAN (1973) was a story of a war fought against diabolic doctor and his attempt to demolish the structures of reason and so liberate mankind from the chains of the reality principle.
"I can date to that time and to that sense of heightened awareness of the society around me in the summer of 1968, my own questioning of the nature of my reality as a woman.