I also fell in love with Angela Carter’s short stories and novels as a teenager. My copy of the slim short story collection The Bloody Chamber, which features this story, is very worn. I have picked this very sad vampire story because I have reread it so many times hoping for a different outcome for the Countess, much as she turns over the same cards on the table again and again. It is a delicious, hopeless love!
Angela Carter was known for her feminist, magical realism and picaresque stories, but she also specialized in the fairy story, collecting folk tales and subverting them in subtle ways. You feel like you are discovering something virgin fresh that also has the must of age about it. This collection inspired the film The Company of Wolves, but the story of ‘The Lady of the House of Love’ was unfortunately missed from that. The closest retelling I have seen is the video for Daisy Chainsaw’s ‘Hope Your Dreams Come True’.
First published in The Iowa Review, 1975. Collected in The Bloody Chamber, Gollancz, 1979 and in Burning Your Boats: Collected Stories, Vintage, 1996
A Personal Anthology 