Angela Carter

The doc on BBC2 makes her sound like she had a mildly interesting life.

She's sold on quite a lot and maybe I'm fighting against that. None of the readings make me want to read her.

The Bloody Chamber is a great collection. Search the title story, “The Erl-King”, “Puss-in-Boots” especially.

Seconded

reading her for the first time ever; bought a used paperback of the Bloody Chamber several years back in Edinburgh. title story is extremely well written and I suspect I'll dig in further when I get done with this one.

xyz, I tend to agree -- the programme was quite well made, a good advert for AC, but full if simplification, and very one-sided, one-dimensional -- essentially in this programme she could do no wrong.

If there is a serious critical case for Carter (ie: if we can debate value at all) then there must be one against her too. I'm ambivalent. These programmes can't handle that low level of complexity.

The claim that 'she had left the best till last' is pure convenience and there is no reason it should be true - after all, she was ill while writing her last novel. Personally I sadly found the last novel to be full of her worst features.

I regret feeling this way about her; wish I liked her writing a bit more than I do.

I found the Bloody Chamber rather trite when I read it, but I feel like this was influenced by the fact that "feminist fairy tales" were in no way a novel conceit by the '00s, and it's maybe unfair to judge a book from the '70s on the fact that I was personally tired of its genre. I have always thought about picking up one of her novels to compare with that collection, but not got around to it yet.

(Just want to absolutely clarify that I was in no way anti the feminism side of "feminist fairy tales", just that I'd experienced a whole bunch of pop cultural retellings and didn't feel like there was much more that this collection added.)

no, I totally get that & sometimes have the same response with exactly that sort of thing - inversions are incredible when they're new and seem played out when you've been engaging the ideas for a while. but the quality of the writing in The Bloody Chamber is, so far, just impossibly high - this may be because it's a genre book and plenty of genre writers put plot & pace above style imo. Whereas this, Christ it's delicious

If there is a serious critical case for Carter (ie: if we can debate value at all) then there must be one against her too.

I get that, although for me its not 100% for or against this or that particular writer. Perry Anderson was (in the two essays on Powell we've been talking about in the other thread) critical of certain aspects of Proust's writing whilst acknowledging the many strengths.

A problem with the programme was that it was too focused on Carter and the British literary scene. Here is someone who actually spent a lot of time in Japanese culture (fine that was covered) and also wrote a book on Sade - so I'm guessing she must have engaged with French theory - and there is a latin America magical realist bent to her which reminds me of Isabel Allende (a writer I haven't read but is curiously attacked by male Latin American writers) but the programme was making too much on things like 'conventional' Anita Brookner beating her to win the booker prize that one year.

That's exactly my point: there is a case for Carter, and a case against her, simultaneously. Pros and cons. Part of an ambivalent, nuanced or even dialectical view.

I feel that she was an important pioneer; politically bold and on the whole virtuous; someone who maybe took risks and created possibilities. I quite like her openness to genres (perhaps she could have gone further). Her journalism shows her, at least, well-read and knowledgeable. And beyond it all, I have a kind of sentimental attachment to her because of the period - a personal thing.

But I also think one can see problems in the writing. And her interviews as glimpsed on that programme don't give me great confidence that she had thought those through or could account for them very convincingly.

re: Japan, the LRB review of the biography said that her Japanese bf killed himself, didn't it? - if I am remembering correctly, I don't think this was mentioned here. I'm afraid the complexities of her first marriage (whatever they were) were scanted too.

But the Brookner point is another good example - in effect, a cue for an hour-long doc on Brookner saying 'she wasn't just "conventional", you know - Anita was a revolutionary'. I suspect there is a fair case to be made for Brookner.

The programme's claim that not awarding the Booker to NIGHTS AT THE CIRCUS was a deliberate snub is embarrassingly, stupidly solipsistic -- you might as well say that many thousands of other novelists were also snubbed. This is very similar to the way people, for a long time, talked about Amis and the Booker - as though he had a right to win it; as though all those other writers didn't exist.

There was an online article a while back saying 'Virginia Woolf's status is stopping people studying other women writers'. I wasn't that sympathetic, as I love Woolf and as it's clearly not right to blame one woman writer for the people people aren't reading others.

But if you give even a bit of credence to that model of thinking, you might say something similar about Carter -- that her high status, certainly in the academy, maybe elsewhere too, may have occluded a lot of other writing, some of which was better.

But, again, I wouldn't want to fall into a false counter-feminist argument of pitting one woman writer against another (which the Brookner moment on the programme did).