Author(s): Edmund Gordon

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Since her death in 1992, at the age of just fifty-one, Angela Carter has been widely acknowledged as one of the most important English writers of the last century. Her work stands out for its bawdiness and linguistic zest, its hospitality to the fantastical and the absurd, and its extraordinary inventiveness and range. Her life was as rich with incident, as vigorously modern, as unconventional, and ultimately as tragic as anything in her fiction. This is the story of how she invented herself - as a new kind of woman and a new kind of writer - and how she came to write such subversive, seductive and distinctive masterworks as The Bloody Chamber, Nights at the Circus and Wise Children. Meticulously researched - facilitated by interviews with Carter's family and friends, as well as unrestricted access to her manuscripts and journals - and artfully constructed, this is literary biography at its very best. Edmund Gordon uncovers a wealth of new details about the life of this extraordinary writer, and skilfully captures the remarkable personality that left an indelible mark on English fiction.