Carter, Angela Olive (1940-92), English novelist, poet, essayist, born in Eastbourned and educated at Bristol University. She was Arts Council Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Sheffield from 1976 to 1978, and from 1980 to 1981 was Visiting Professor in the Writing Program at Brown Uiversity. Her work is imbued with a keen sense of the macabre and the wittily surreal and draws heavily on symbolism and themes derived from traditional fairy-tales and folk myths. Her first two books, a volume of poetry (Unicorn, 1966) and the thriller (Shadow Dance, 1966) were followed by The Magic Toyshop (1967, filmed 1986), which associated her with the tradition of magic realism and won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize. Several Perceptions (1968) won the Somerset Maugham Award. Succeding novels developed further a characteristic neo-Gothic ambience, often underpinned by a strong, but never intrusive, feminist sensibiliy: Heroes and Villains (1969), set in the aftermath of nuclear conflict, the more conventional Love (1971), and The Infernal Desire of Machines of Dr Hoffman (1972). After Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1974) her next novel, The Passion of New Eve (1977), was centrally concerned with feminist issues, as was a later cultural study, The Sadeian Woman (1979). Nights at the Circus (1974), about a female Victorian circus performer called Fevvers who can fly, confirmed her as a gifted literary fabulist, while her ability to evoke and adapt the darker resonances of traditional forms of fantasy was brilliant deployed in The Bloody Chamber and Other sStories (1979), which contains one of her best-known reworkings of traditional material, "The Comapany of Wolves"(based on the story of Little Red Riding Hood), filmed in 1984). Her last novel, Wise Children (1991), was an extravagant and bawdy chronicle of two theatrical families. She translated the fairy-tales of Charles Perrault (1977) and, in collaboration with the artist Michael Forman , produced a retelling of Sleeping Beauty and other fairy-tales. (1982). She also compiled the Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1990-2). Black Venus (1985) is a collection of short stories. A selection of her critical writings, Expletives Deleted, was published posthumously in 1992. A further posthumous collection of stories and sketches appeared in 1993 as American Ghosts and Old World Wonders.
The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford University Press. Ed.Margaret Drabble. 1995