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

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 [...]

Angela Carter Cover Art

Throughout Angela Carter month I have made mention of the fabulously designed cover art by the illustrator, Roxanna Bikadoroff, which I find not only striking but representative of Carter and her work; I now associate the bold cover art of the Virago copies (photographed above) and the Penguin US (some of which are shown in [...]

Wayward Girls and Wicked Women

Angela Carter was enthusiastically involved with Virago Press and collected and edited two volumes of short stories for the publisher of books by women: Wayward Girls and Wicked Women and Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales; the former is the book I wish to discuss today. I have reviewed a few short story collections in [...]

Fireworks by Angela Carter

Lorna Sage (author, literary critic, and great friend of Angela Carter) described Carter’s writing as “pyrotechnic – fuelled with ideas, packed with images and spangling the night with her starry language”; the complimentary accolade connotes an image of fireworks. The short fiction collection of the same name, her first collection of short stories, came relatively [...]

Magic Toyshops

This post was originally a guest post for Verity’s Virago Venture last year that focuses on The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter, a copy of which you can win here. The post provides a brief overview of Carter’s relationship with Virago Books and how they have marketed the novel since they began to publish it [...]

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