Click on the photo to the right to be taken to the National Portrait Gallery to see other photographs of Angela Carter.
	*Biography* Angela Olive Stalker was born in Eastbourne, Sussex, England on the 8th May 1940. War had broken out in Europe and she was evacuated as a child to Yorkshire to live with her maternal grandmother, a working-class, matriarchal, domineering, feminist bread-'n-buta granny of the north of England. It's not surprising that Carter's first years were later to have so much of an influence on her writing and philosophy. We can almost imagine that maternal grandmother sitting by the fire, with a woolen shawl wrapped round her telling Carter stories and tales by the warmth of the burning coal. We can almost imagine Carter remembering those times gone by as she wrote The Bloody Chamber collection of feminist fairytales in the late 1970's, in which she took on the role of Old Mother Goose to bring back to life the tales of Bluebeard, Little Red Riding Hood, and Alice in Wonderland - not forgetting the transformation of the Erl-King in the forest (which she based on the poem by Goethe and the opera by Schubert). Carter left school and started work at the age of nineteen for the Croydon Advertiser, following in the footsteps of her father - who was a Scottish journalist working in London. One year later she met and married Paul Carter. She was to divorce him almost twelve years after, in 1972. She studied English at the University of Bristol and built on her already vast cultural and literary baggage. Her mother was a great literary influence on her, as she devoured book after book and author after author. Her upbringing was very much based on the works of Shakespeare and great names of English literature. The influence of authors on her work is enormous and perhaps incalculable. There are references to Chaucer, Shakespeare, Lawrence, Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, Mansfield, Woolf, Dickens, Keats, Stoker, Carroll and on and on the list will go...she was not just confined to English literature either. She spoke French and German and was interested in the philosophy of De Sade and Bataille regarding sexuality, Irigaray and De Beauvoir for feminist theory, and Genette and Barthes for ideas concerning intertextuality and analysis of texts. She was also greatly influenced by her short two-year stay in Japan, after having won the Somerset Maugham prize for Literature - she always said that Maugham would have been pleased to know that she used the five hundred pounds - which apparently went further back then - to run away from her husband and British culture. She ended up working in a bar in Tokyo and writing in her free time. She learnt what it was like to be a woman in society; she was able to analyze British cultural and societal structuring and criticize it for all it was worth. She finished by travelling all over the world visiting the States, Asia and then back to Europe to try and sort out all the imagery that she said she had come into contact with over the years of travelling I] encountered [...] the most beautiful transvestite in the whole of Greenwich Village, a Russian wrestler who had a wallet of photographs showing himself wrestling with a bear; a frayed Japanese with nicotine-stained teeth who told me Dostoevsky was his spiritual father...[Shaking a Leg, 203] In 1977, Carter married Mark Pearce and they settled down in Balham in south London. She worked on and off over the next decade as part-time lecturer and resident writer at Brown University, Rhode Island, the University of Adelaide, South Australia and finally at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. Angela Carter died on the 16^th of February 1992 at the age of 51 from cancer. Margaret Atwood said of her in the obituary published in The Observer Newspaper one week later: She was the opposite of parochial. Nothing, for her, was outside the pale: she wanted to knowabout everything and everyone, and every place and every word. She relished life and language hugely, and revelled in the diverse.