“Who’s your favourite author?” is one of those questions that, on first ask, seems like a good idea. An easy icebreaker surely, a quick way of chivvying along conversation until it gathers momentum… Well, sometimes it works. It can be just the nudge needed to prompt in-depth chat. Yet it can also be met with a string of oh’s and umm’s and ah’s and let me think’s. The open-endedness occasionally leads to a kind of blank space where answers should be; the mental bookshelf where writers and texts are usually stacked is suddenly empty.
There are tons of authors I love: Virginia Woolf, Laurie Lee, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Thomas Hardy, Jeanette Winterson, Oscar Wilde, Alan Garner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Helen Oyeyemi are just a few. Which one is ‘favourite’ will depend on the day, the mood, the last thing I read. But now in that first-flash instant answer there’s one I tend to reach for above the others – Angela Carter. It’s not that I value her work more than any other. She holds no favoured position at the top of some bullet point list. It just happens that her name is the one that floats up naturally: a ready-made response when on the spot.
So, why Carter? Let’s start with the style of writing. It can only really be captured in a rag-tag selection of adjectives: ‘crackling’ and ‘ornate’ and ‘dynamic’ and ‘sharp’ and ‘sumptuous’ and ‘bawdy’ and ‘disturbing’ and ‘inventive’. Sometimes it’s too rich, dripping with description after description until it’s heavy and hard to navigate. But mostly it’s a kind of playful delight – a space to revel in language and image.
Then there’s the fact that so many of the themes she explores and subverts – image, appearance, gender, sexuality, performance, the body, history, looking and being looked at – are ones I’m naturally interested in. Whether shaking up conventional male and female roles in The Bloody Chamber, suggesting that it matters little whether spectacular winged woman Fevvers is ‘genuine’ or ‘artificial’ in Nights at the Circus, raiding every Shakespeare play possible in Wise Children or writing with rich wit about fashion in her essays, her work remains always entertaining and provocative. There are fairytales and fantasies, mirrors and puppets and pretty dresses, circuses and Russian railways, twins and lovers and marriage and family feuds.
Her books are also multi-layered. It’s almost impossible to write about her fiction without lapsing into academic speak: “inversion of the subject-object divide”, or ways in which “the female body itself becomes the site of a performance of femininity.”( Blame the fact that my exams begin the day after tomorrow). However, while her books always offer the challenge of a complex text to be unraveled, I think I cite her as favourite for a more simple reason: reading for sheer pleasure.
I felt that this rather magnificent vintage 70s dress (bought from eBay by my mum) was appropriately Angela Carter-esque - complete with fairytale references, outlandish detail and some rather ominous looking trees across the skirt. Roses are a recurring motif in Carter's texts, so I thought I'd pay homage with some dried ones pinned in my hair. The jewellery is a mixture of second hand, vintage and Bill Skinner.
I felt that this rather magnificent vintage 70s dress (bought from eBay by my mum) was appropriately Angela Carter-esque - complete with fairytale references, outlandish detail and some rather ominous looking trees across the skirt. Roses are a recurring motif in Carter's texts, so I thought I'd pay homage with some dried ones pinned in my hair. The jewellery is a mixture of second hand, vintage and Bill Skinner.
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