ABSTRACT
Fevvers, the powerful central voice and character of Angela Carter’s novel, Nights at the Circus, makes much of her London birth and roots at the start of the novel. Carter herself, however, was denied this identity as a native-born Londoner by the Second World War (1939-45). Her mother took refuge from the Blitz, first in Eastbourne (a popular seaside resort on the Sussex coast) where Carter was born in 1940, and then subsequently in South Yorkshire, in the home of Carter’s grandmother, before returning to the capital when the war was over. In these bare facts, however, several issues emerge which are crucial to this novel in which questions of birth and origins are so central: London as a point of departure and return, the displacements caused by personal and historical change or conflict, the material and emotional protection offered by women and matriarchs; and, in Eastbourne, a place that has been associated with music hall and other forms of popular entertainment. Nonetheless, Nights at the Circus is also a novel that should make us cautious in our treatment of personal biographical information in that it clearly celebrates the inclination to fictionalize and embroider over the need to nail facts to the wall. Still, there are significant events, both from Carter’s own life and from the literary and historical contexts within which she worked, that bear on the novel in instructive ways.
