ABSTRACT
Angela Carter (1940-92) is widely acknowledged as one of the leading British women writers of the twentieth century. She is best known for her novels and short stories, but she was also the author of numerous cultural commentaries in the form of essays and reviews which gave rise to two collections of journalism, Nothing Sacred (1982) and Expletives Deleted (1992). These were collected posthumously in Shaking a Leg: Collected Journalism and Writing (1997). Born Angela Olive Stalker, Carter was raised in Yorkshire during the war by her maternal grandmother and, although she spent most of her life in England, she also lived for short periods in Japan, the United States and Australia. Her father was a Scottish journalist and she herself began work in 1959 as a junior reporter on the Croydon Advertiser before reading English at Bristol University, 1962-5, specializing in the medieval period. Although she earned her living primarily as a writer, she also held a number of visiting and part-time positions in higher education, including Arts Council of Great Britain Fellow in Creative Writing at Sheffield University (1976-8), Visiting Professor at Brown University, USA (1980-1) and part-time teacher in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia (1984-7), as well as appointments as writer-in-residence in Australia and the USA. In addition to the works of journalism referred to earlier, she published nine novels, four collections of short stories and The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (1979). Other works include a volume of radio plays, a translation of the fairy stories of Charles Perrault, and edited collections of fairy and folk tales. She also edited Wayward Girls and Wicked Women: An Anthology of Subversive Stories (1986) and, in 1984, she wrote the screenplay for Company of Wolves based on The Bloody Chamber.
