The Infernal Desire Machines in Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s Bluebeard’s Keys and Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber”

Between 1866 and 1874 Anne Thackeray Ritchie published nine revisions of well-known fairy tales. The fi rst four stories (“Sleeping Beauty in the Woods,” “Cinderella,” “Beauty and the Beast,” and “Little Red Riding Hood”) and the novella, Jack the Giant-Killer, appeared over a two-year period in the Cornhill Magazine and were collected in Five Old Friends and a Young Prince (1868).1 Four more such revisions (Bluebeard’s Keys, Riquet à la Houppe, Jack and the Bean-Stalk, and The White Cat) were subsequently serialized and collected in Bluebeard’s Keys and Other Stories (1874).2