“She will never have the chance to shock us at 70.”

Posted on | May 7, 2010 | 6 Comments

Today would have been Angela Carter’s seventieth birthday, had she lived and not died at the age of fifty-one from cancer.  The words of Lorna Sage in her obituary of Carter, “She will never have the chance to shock us at 70”, is unbearably poignant today.  The world lost an amazing literary talent and although she was not our intellectual property and her death is sad in its own right, selfishly we cannot help but imagine what prolific work she would have produced had she lived, not least of all the sequel to Jane Eyre, the later life of Jane’s stepdaughter, Adèle Varens, on which she was working on when she died.  Her swan-song, Wise Children, is full of abundant life and energy, and, published the year of her death, it remains a fitting, lively, and never-dying tribute to her.

Had I had the foresight I would have timed my Angela Carter month in April to finish today; this of course would have inconveniently and overwhelmingly clashed with Persephone Reading Week and I am not altogether confident that the sensibilities of Persephone Books and Angela Carter mesh (regardless of how much affection I have for both).  Carter  famously said of Virago Books (the press who famously did not like Persephone favourite, Dorothy Whipple):

I am moved towards it by the desire that no daughter of mine should ever be in a position to be able to write BY GRAND CENTRAL STATION I SAT DOWN AND WEPT, exquisite prose though it might contain.  BY GRAND CENTRAL STATION I TORE OFF HIS BALLS would be more like it, I should hope.

Lorna Sage, Good As Her Word: Selected Journalism (London: Fourth Estate, 2003), p. 75.

Instead I overlap the two events, draw your attention to the date, and urge you to read Angela Carter if you have not yet done so and that is all that I can offer in memorial.

Since Angela Carter month drew to a close there have been a few reviews, which I would like to share with you, along with this  article by journalist Kate Webb -the only press tribute- acknowledging today (thank you kindly to Kirsty of Other Stories who brought it to my attention), and from which I borrowed the Lorna Sage quote for the title of this post.

Dioni of Bookie Mee said of Carter -in relation to The Bloody Chamber- that “[w]hat sets her apart for me is how her writing oozes sexuality. It’s almost like girl soft-porn for the literary minded” (she means that as a compliment, which is how I took it!)

Jenny of Jenny’s Books aptly wrote about the swan-song, Wise Children and said of the author, “I think that Angela Carter is like what I imagine marzipan to be like, or maybe this particular sort of chocolate mint cake my father has: delicious and rich but you maybe wouldn’t want a massive lot of it at once”.  Jenny was concerned it was an unfair metaphor but I think it is the perfect analogy.

My name-sake Claire of Kiss a Cloud read her first Carter (after much haranguing by myself) and made it The Magic Toyshop; her thoughts on Carter were that her “brashness advances into the revolting. Carter definitely didn’t hold back”.  Again, an apt and fair evaluation; I personally love Carter’s no-holds-bar approach to description and tackling of themes.

Pri of another cookie crumbles continued her exploration of Carter’s work, this time with her debut novel, Shadow Dance (Honeybuzzard in the States); she thought it “an incredibly strong debut” that takes a “special kind of talent for the writer to write a book, where none of the characters are really likeable, and yet, the story is completely captivating”.

The loss of a writer “at the height of her powers as a novelist” (Sage) was tragic and today I mourn and celebrate her.

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A book blog written by a reader who enjoys The Beatles and who is not wholly averse to hardbacks.

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