ABSTRACT
The last thing you’d ever need to do with an Angela Carter text is to send it on an assertiveness training course. With her death (and no one has spoken more effectively on that than her last novel, Wise Children, ‘a broken heart is never a tragedy. Only untimely death is a tragedy’) the obituaries have started to evoke her as the gentle, wonderful white witch of the north. But far from being gentle, Carter’s texts were known for the excessiveness of their violence and, latterly, the almost violent exuberance of their excess. Many a reader has found the savagery with which she can attack cultural stereotypes disturbing, even alienating. Personally I found (and find) it exhilarating—you never knew what was coming next from the avant-garde literary terrorist of feminism.
