An overdue biography of Angela Carter

The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography. By Edmund Gordon. Chatto & Windus; 525 pages; £25. To be published in America by Oxford University Press in March.

READERS and critics have tended to pigeonhole Angela Carter, or reshape her in their own image. Undergraduates often reduce the British novelist, whose stories are known for their magical realism and striking female characters, to a mouthpiece of feminism. Tributes when she died in 1992, at just 51, cast her as a “fairy queen”, a “benevolent white witch” and a “fairy godmother”. The novelist loathed being appropriated or misinterpreted; when an editor, believing Carter to be “an Earth mother”, asked her to write about the summer solstice at Stonehenge, she said: “You just haven’t got me, have you dear?”

The true Carter emerges from the pages of Edmund Gordon’s expansive new biography thanks to a huge body of journals and letters. Her mother was infantilising, prudish and smothering; her father was a loquacious and much-loved journalist who treated Angela to expensive gifts, dresses and “a succession of cats”. Putty in his daughter’s hands, her father, Carter complained in 1983, “did not prepare [her] well for patriarchy”. At 17, Angela rebelled by taking up smoking, wearing tight skirts and swearing “openly and elaborately” (a colleague at the Croydon Advertiser said that he had “never heard a woman use the f-word in [his] life, but Angie did it all the time”). This early life—particularly the claustrophobic relationship with her mother—left an imprint upon her writing. In “The Christchurch Murder”, based on a true story, she considered why a teenager might be driven to matricide.

Carter felt that writing was a means to ask questions, “not to provide answers”. Her relationship with the feminist movement was one of “[sniping] from the sidelines” rather than active involvement. Her ego was stung by repeated snubs for the Booker prize, Britain’s biggest award for fiction. She hated being reduced to a “woman writer”, but felt deep down that men such as Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan were “very much more famous and very much richer and also regarded as…the right stuff”. Carter was kind and thoughtful, often championing emerging writers, but also capable of incredible cruelty and ugliness. She wished that the wife of one of her lovers would “kill or try to kill herself”.

Mr Gordon is especially strong on the myriad influences on Carter’s writing, all the while noting her uniqueness. “Shadow Dance” bears a “Nabokovian hue”, “The Magic Toyshop” grew out of a single line in André Breton’s “First Surrealist Manifesto”, and Manhattan in the time of the Black Panthers and the Stonewall riots offered the dystopian backdrop for “The Passion of New Eve”. Mr Gordon calls much of her work “symbolic autobiography”. She found it funny that no one thought to read her in the character of Lee in “Love”: “I even put in clues like knocking out his front tooth, dammit, and nobody guessed!”

Yet there are some disappointing omissions. There is no explanation or suggestion as to why Carter returned again and again to certain images—the Greek myth of Leda and the swan, for example. Conversely, some of the detail can swerve into tedium; the reader is informed not only that Carter paid $300 a month in rent when living in Providence, Rhode Island, but that the figure included utilities. Mr Gordon makes a grating imaginative leap by suggesting that Carter’s support for four female writers aged between 60 and 80 is symbolic of a “new-found peace with the idea of motherhood”.

These are momentary flaws. Mr Gordon’s elegant blending of research, analysis and Carter’s own testimony is all the more impressive given that this is his debut book. It is surprising, too, that Mr Gordon’s is the first full-length biography of Carter, whose novels continue to populate Vintage Classics’ bestseller list. She once wondered why “anyone [should] be interested in my boring, alienated, marginal, messy life”. Reading this book, it seems clear that more readers and biographers should devote their time to this complex, intelligent and thoroughly un-boring woman.