‘Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ by Angela Carter

What’s going on at the edges of the words in a Shakespeare play—or any great canonical text, for that matter? This story is like a guided tour of the strange truth behind the painted backdrop, the real characters underneath the pretend-poetry version, the waterlogged English wood sitting soggily beneath the theatrical pretence, the heart of darknesses (of patriarchy; of imperialism) at the play’s core. And yet it’s also a story of visions, that are poetic, and magic, and hilarious, and unknowable, in their own right.

First published in Black Venus, Chatto & Windus, 1985, and collected in Burning Your Boats: Collected Stories, Chatto & Windus, 1995; Vintage, 2006

‘The Lady of the House of Love’ by Angela Carter

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

‘The Werewolf’ by Angela Carter

Chosen by Andrew McDonnell

Is there a more wintery book than The Bloody Chamber? You can almost feel the hot breath from the beasts that drip blood across the snow as you flick the pages. There are many stories to choose from: the toxic masculinity of Mr Lyon, or the wolves circling in the snow in ‘The Company of Wolves’. For me, the one I come back to again and again is ‘The Werewolf’.

It’s an unusual story: barely 2,000 words long, yet split into two parts of equal length. The first part tells of a Northern country where cold people have cold hearts, and then there’s a switch to a narrative in the second part. We hear of a child taking treats to Grandma’s house on the other side of the forest. On her way she meets a wolf, and in self-defence chops off one of the wolf’s paws using her father’s hunting knife. It flees back into the forest. When she reaches Grandma’s house, she finds the old woman feverish. She’s also missing a hand. When the child pulls the wolf’s paw out of her pocket it has become a human hand. The girl calls for the neighbours who chase the old woman out into the snow and beat her to death. The girl inherits Grandma’s house and lives happily ever after.

Carter’s genius lies in her acute understanding of our complacency as readers. During the first part, the narrator addresses us in the second person, saying how these superstitious people are so unlike ‘you and I’, and distancing us from the storyworld. She draws a gross dichotomy between them and us. This is the clever part. When I have taught this story, students always transpose Little Red Riding Hood onto the second part. They never pause to think through the holes in the child’s story, nor to ask how come these ‘superstitious’ people essentially offer the child the keys to her grandmother’s house without question. The manner in which folk and fairy tales shape our consciousness is a currency Carter exploits hilariously. So, we are in the end, no different from the people in that Northern country. We are as superstitious and naive. Happy Christmas.

First published in The Bloody Chamber and other Stories, Gollancz, 1979. Also available in Burning Your Boats, Carter’s collected stories, Chatto & Windus, 1995. * Andrew McDonnell is a published writer of poetry and short fiction. His first collection of poems, The Somnambulist Cookbook, was published in by Salt in 2019.

‘The Company of Wolves’ by Angela Carter

Angela Carter’s most famous book, The Bloody Chamber, is godmother to an entire genre, with its re-imagining of fairy tales through a feminist perspective. I sometimes wonder, as yet another young writer comes out with a book of inverted fantasy stories, whether they have been directly influenced by Carter, or whether the genre she created is so established that they don’t even realise.

I first read this at university, not so long after it had been published, and it had already spawned the excellent film of the same name as this story. That the story of the film is a mere 11 pages long gives you a sense of the richness of Carter’s vision. In the revision of Little Red Riding Hood, the young girl who meets the charming hunter in the wood on the way to see her grandmother, is no ingenue, and no way is she going to be a wolf’s dinner. The phrase “some men are hairy on the inside” remains resonant. The story itself is a strange beast, part a history of wolf lore, part the Red Riding Hood tale. It continues to astonish.

First published in Bananas, 1977. Collected in The Bloody Chamber, Gollancz, 1979, and in Burning Your Boats: Collected Stories, Vintage, 1996

‘The Company of Wolves’ by Angela Carter

Now a great howling rose up all around them, near, very near, as close as the kitchen garden, the howling of a multitude of wolves; she knew the worst wolves are hairy on the inside and she shivered, in spite of the scarlet shawl she pulled more closely round herself as if it could protect her although it was as red as the blood she must spill.

This was the first Angela Carter I read. Of course, it blew my mind; not just her audacious reimagining of a seemingly innocent fairy story but the sensuousness of the language, the juicy tactility, the earthiness of the prose, all guts and gristle. It is wonderfully subversive and playful – for in Carter play is deadly serious –and of course the ending does not lead where one expects it to.

I bought The Bloody Chamber but I think I went straight to ‘The Company of Wolves’ because I loved Neil Jordan’s film of it. It may not the greatest of her stories, but it is the one I’ve gone back to the most times.

First published in Bananas, 1977. Collected in The Bloody Chamber, Gollancz, 1979, and in Burning Your Boats: Collected Stories, Vintage, 1996

‘The Bloody Chamber’ by Angela Carter

A story for November

‘The Bloody Chamber’ has one of my favourite scenes: a young woman trapped in Bluebeard’s castle and facing a beheading by her husband is rescued in a wild, theatrical, tremendous moment:

You never saw such a wild thing as my mother, her hat seized by the winds and blown out to sea so that her hair was her white mane, her black lisle legs exposed to the thighs, her skirts tucked round her waist, one hand on the reins of the rearing horse while the other clasped by father’s service revolver.”

Yeah! Her mother bursts into the castle one of the many very visible, vocal, violent women in this short story collection. It’s set in the winter, making the most of the bleak, cold imagery that it offers: “The heavy sword, unsheathed, grey as that November morning, sharp as childbirth, mortal.”

First published in The Bloody Chamber, Gollancz, 1979. Available from Vintage Classics

‘The Bloody Chamber’ by Angela Carter

Adolescence…

I was seventeen and knew nothing of the world…

Angela Carter’s masterly retelling of the story of Bluebeard and his murdered wives begins with the seventeen-year-old narrator travelling by train “away from Paris, away from girlhood, away from the white, enclosed quietude of my mother’s apartment, into the unguessable country of marriage.” She is also journeying into that liminal, unpredictable terrain that lies between child- and adulthood; between innocence and experience; between fear and desire. Of her new husband we are told that he is “older than I. He was much older than I; there were streaks of silver in his dark main.” He is also immensely wealthy and a widower a few times over, and it doesn’t take our seventeen year-old narrator long to realise that she is seriously out of her depth: that she has come too soon to that “unguessable country”; and that she will be made to pay a price for her folly.

‘The Bloody Chamber’ is brilliantly sustained piece of floridly gothic writing – by turns darkly funny, sensuously erotic and humanely moving, with gleeful forays into the blackest horror that lies at the heart of all the best fairy tales. Interestingly – and perhaps provocatively – Carter makes her heroine something more than a mere hapless victim. Throughout the story we are not only reminded of the narrator’s youth and innocence, but also of her “potentiality for corruption” and longing for experience, the narrator seeming to accept some degree of responsibility for the fix she finds herself in:

I could not say I felt one single twinge of regret for the world of tartines and maman that now receded from me as if drawn away on a string, like a child’s toy…

First published in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, by Gollancz, 1979 and currently available from Vintage Classics. Collected in Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories, Chatto & Windus 1995

‘The Bloody Chamber’ by Angela Carter

When I was much too young, I had a huge, illustrated copy of Grimm’s fairy tales, and I would read them over and over, and imprint the grotesque illustrations on the insides of my eyelids. After a full month of nightmares inspired by Bluebeard, my beloved book was confiscated and hidden in the cupboard under the stairs, where I had to sneak-read it, and force myself not to be afraid. Reading Angela Carter as a teenager, all of my nightmares were rewritten by her reimagined fairy tales, and this one is my favourite.

First published in The Bloody Chamber, Gollancz, 1979. Currently available from Vintage Classics

‘The Bloody Chamber’ by Angela Carter

On one level ‘The Bloody Chamber’ is a feminist remix of the tale of Bluebeard, but the narrative has other layers. There is no straightforward ‘key’ to its mysteries: it is packed with psychoanalytic imagery, mythic symbols and literary allusions, including embedded homages to de Sade as well as Perrault. Carter relocates the story to the coast of fin-de-siècle France. The narrator, who has recently married a wealthy Marquis, enters a forbidden room in his castle and makes a horrific and life-threatening discovery. There’s a gripping conclusion, revealing whether she escapes or becomes a victim of uxoricide, but this tale of gothic horror also provokes reflection on the darker aspects of passion and sex.

First published in The Bloody Chamber, Victor Gollancz, 1979. Currently available from Vintage Classics

‘The Lady of the House of Love’ by Angela Carter

I read this when I was fourteen and it blew my mind. The writing felt wonderfully overwrought and iconoclastic. It’s a meet-not-cute (a meet-mute?) haunted by the carnal realities of decrepitude and fucking. Peak Carter: bawdy and romantic, gritty and baroque. I can picture it as a cinematic cross between a Luis Bunuel and Sofia Coppola film. Crumbling Tarot cards, a rose the colour of dried-up menstrual blood.

First published in The Iowa Review, Summer/Autumn 1975, and available online here in slightly different form. Collected in The Bloody Chamber, Gollancz, 1979, currently available from Vintage, 1995, and in Burning Your Boats: Collected Stories, Vintage, 1996.

‘The Company of Wolves’ by Angela Carter

Before Jeanette Winterson there was Angela Carter, whose work is more wide-ranging, less egotistical, more magical. For too many years fairy stories have been Disneyed down, infantilised. Here the tales are not only reclaimed for adults but also transformed into narratives where females have agency. This is a variant of the Red Riding Hood story but the heroine is no child victim. “She has her knife and she is afraid of nothing.” She is “nobody’s meat”. Happiness is to be found in grandmother’s bed, even though it’s unclear if the woman and her wolf-lover will live happily ever after.

First published in Bananas, 1977. Collected in The Bloody Chamber, Gollancz, 1979, currently available from Vintage, 1995, and in Burning Your Boats: Collected Stories, Vintage, 1996

‘The Snow Child’ by Angela Carter

When I was very young – probably too young – my Mum used to read me Grimms’ Fairytales as a treat, and I was transfixed by them, utterly repulsed and delighted. All the things I hadn’t really felt again from stories until I read Angela Carter. Her work is a gift, on repeat, and I’ll never tire of it. It’s not surprising that the story I’ve chosen is a retelling of the Grimms’ of the same name, and that its significant detail change that makes Carter’s last in the memory. The man calls The Snow Child into being, instead of the woman.

He creates his perfect women, with his actual flesh and bones wife right there next to him.

Angela Carter does so many things so well, but for me, it’s the physicality of the women in her stories that grab me. They inhabit their bodies from the inside out and I found that startling and overwhelming when I was sixteen, that they could appear fully formed and bloody, not just peered at with clean or structured desire.

AND YET, this story shows women as that exactly, clean and structured, a man’s-eye view, conjured and controlled by the Count, to his tastes. The way it’s done, though, doesn’t collude with him, it smashes him to bits, and laughs at him, but is always aware of how dangerous it is, the laughing. It may be short, but this story manages to pick apart, build, laugh and destroy so many things at once. The Count’s sexuality is ridiculous and terrifying. The women he desires are dead or a scatter of objects, a series of two-dismensional photographs framed by his eyes. It, like everything Carter wrote, is spectacular.

(There’s something about the black fox furs jumping from the Countess’ shoulders onto the girl’s that has stuck with me, since that day in 1993 when I first read it, and, as an aside I’m still, all these years later, longing for a pair of high, black, shining boots with scarlet heels, and spurs. When I have a pair of these, I will know I’ve made it.)

From The Bloody Chamber, first published in 1979 by Gollancz. Now Vintage Classics.

‘The Erl King’ by Angela Carter

I include this because it’s a story that gave me one of those heart-stopping moments, falling in love, aching with envy, resolving to try and keep trying to write. I also once used it in an exercise on a writing course, where I had to compare the qualities – literal and metaphorical – of a story I admired with one of my own. Depressing, but instructive. The Erl-King is the bad-boy type you’re not supposed to fall for, and are therefore seduced by – after all, he does have goat’s cheese, wild mushrooms and rabbit stew in his one-room woodland hut. He also has cages full of birds, a metaphor too heavy for most writers to handle but one Carter whisks into this plum pudding of a story with ease, probably with a cigarette in the other hand. Reading this is a feast, of a kind that nobody can now reproduce. Carter’s brew transcends fashions in fiction, and thank goodness; this is an antidote to minimalism should you ever need one, but most glorious when read on its own luscious terms.

In Burning Your Boats, Vintage, 1996; first published in The Bloody Chamber, Gollancz, 1979

‘The Erl-King’ by Angela Carter

The Bloody Chamber is one of my favourite collections, and plays a key part in what I hope will be my next published novel. All the stories are deliciously rich in symbolism, sensual language and allusions to fairy tales. ‘The Erl-King’, a retelling of a Scandinavian legend about a sinister forest spirit who lures a young woman into his woodland dwelling, is my favourite. Carter’s descriptions are as lush and detailed as mediaeval tapestries: “There was a little tangled mist in the thickets, mimicking the tufts of old man’s beard that flossed the lower branches of the trees and bushes, heavy branches of red berries as ripe and delicious as goblin or enchanted fruit hung on the hawthorns… One by one, the ferns have curled up their hundred eyes and curled back into the earth. The trees threaded a cat’s cradle of half-stripped branches over me…”

The Erl-King is both frightening and alluring, and there are some wonderfully spooky passages, including this, which has, for me, the chill of infinity: ‘I walked through the wood until all its perspectives converged upon a darkening clearing; as soon as I saw them, I knew at once that all its occupants had been waiting for me from the moment I first stepped into the wood, with the endless patience of wild things, who have all the time in the world’. That ‘endless patience’ is so sinister.

(from The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories,Vintage Books, 2006, first published 1979)