Taking A Page or Two From Angela Carter's Book

This cover's a bit "Run For Your Wife", isn't it? 

What's that coming put of her stomach, a leg? No I don't like this.

 

 Re-reading Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber I kept trying to remember how old I was when I'd first read it, or more specifically, how much I already knew about - you know - sex. I'd certainly gone through something of a Fay Weldon phase after my A-levels, devouring She-Devil, Praxis, Life Force and Joanna May in a bed-sit in Battersea before I'd ever so much as kissed a girl offstage, but I'm pretty sure Bloody Chamber was after that.

 

 I sort of knew what to expect though, having grown up with films of both The Magic Toyshop and The Company of Wolves on VHS, but there's more to Angela Carter's writing than the subject matter - to quote Helen Simpson's introduction: "To say she is wonderful at surfaces sounds a little disparaging, as if to say she is superficial. No; she is good at surfaces as the Gawain poet is good at surfaces." Or, to put it another way, sexy. 

 Even if I didn't find the writing itself sexy, at least the first time around, I found the possibility it was intended to be sexy sexy, and that's probably what strikes me most re-reading it: the realisation that, as someone who grew up finding boys talking about sex unpleasant, what attracted me most to the work of these Second-Wave Feminist Magical Realists may simply have been the promise of a good sexual education. and given these were fantasies, and the men in them often literally beasts, that's a potentially awkward realisation. These pictures are from the pages of Angela Carter's journal, which turns up in the BBC's excellent Of Wolves and Women here.