Angela Carter obituary

The soaring imagination

Angela Carter died yesterday aged 51 and at the height of her powers as a novelist. The boldness of her writing, her powers of enchantment and hilarity, her generous inventiveness, all make this premature and tragic death harder to take. We needed her around.

She interpreted the times for us with unrivalled penetration: her branching and many-layered narratives mirrored our shifting world of identities lost and found, insiders versus outsiders, alternative histories and utopias postponed. In her stories there's a magical democracy - no class distinction between probable people and improbable (even impossible) ones, or between humans and animals and allegories. All of her writing was at odds with conventional realism, yet she mapped with great precision the history and topography of our fantasies. She was miraculously 'at home' in this epoch where people and their 'images', facts and their shadows, co-exist so closely and menacingly.

Like the twin heroines of her last novel, Wise Children (1991), she began and ended in south London, though her parents were migrants from the north: her journalist father Hugh Stalker, a Scot, Olive a Yorkshirewoman. She had a brief spell as a junior reporter, then married in 1960 and went to Bristol University in 1962, where she contrived to specialise in medieval literature, and read a lot of anthropology, sociology and psychology, more or less on the side. She stayed on in Bristol, and three of her first four novels are set in the provincial Bohemia she both inhabited and analysed with fascination.

She wrote brilliantly about the way styles were being recycled, and her own style had, appropriately enough, a patina of second-hand charm, all quotation and parody. The best known of these books, The Magic Toyshop (1967), won the Somerset Maugham Award, and has been filmed and - something unimaginable even 10 years ago - has become a set text in schools. Love, written in 1969/70 but not published until 1971, was a lethally accurate and extremely beautiful elegy on the decade of her first youth.

By now she had become a vagrant and an adventurer. Her first marriage was over and she went off to Japan, first on a visit and from 1970 lived there for two years. Although this experience is seldom directly reflected in the fiction (except for Fireworks, 1974) her habit of seeing yourself and your culture from the outside is everywhere evident in her later work. (Similarly with more theoretical material on displacement - structuralist stuff from Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Foucault). She'd already found a new fictional formula in Heroes And Villains (1969), a picaresque structure that enabled her to write open-endedly about change; and in the novels that followed - The Infernal Desire Machines Of Dr Hoffman (1972), The Passion Of New Eve (1977) - she produced some of the most suggestive speculative fictions of our time.

Angela somehow understood, not just theoretically but sensuously and imaginatively, that we were living with constructs of ourselves, neither false nor true but mythical and alterable. It was of course a founding feminist perception. As well as writing fiction she was, after her return to England in 1972, writing pieces for the Guardian and New Society, and associating with the women behind Virago Press, particularly Carmen Callil.

For the moment, however, this didn't help her sales: it wasn't until the eighties that readers caught up with her; though The Bloody Chamber (1979) won golden opinions for its brilliant and erotic rewritings of fairy tales, and her exercise in cultural history, The Sadeian Woman, in the same year, shocked some people into the realisation that she knew exactly what she was doing.

During recent years she has come into her own. Though her work has always been alive and dangerous enough to deny her the major literary prizes, she has become part of the contemporary canon, whether you construct it under the aegis of 'post-modernism' or 'feminism'. Nights At The Circus (1984) and Wise Children are no less complex but more ribald and relaxed. Since the later seventies she has settled in London again, with Mark Pearce. Their son was born in 1982, when she was 42, and set her thinking in new ways about time and parenthood. In the last novel, Nora and Dora Chance, grow old most ungracefully, and there's clearly personal feeling in Angela's enjoyment of their indecorous old age.

She will never have the chance herself to shock us at 70, but the books will retain their power to do it. She is a splendid example of the woman writer who made it from the margins; also, just as important, a writer who always demonstrates how vital counter-cultural impulses are to the very existence of any worthwhile tradition. It's a wise child that knows its own mother, as she'd have said.

Perhaps the saddest thought at this moment is that she was so good at making room for hope. There wasn't any for her, however, in these last short months, before lung cancer killed her, and it's no use pretending that she wouldn't have produced new work just as wonderful, given the chance.

Angela Carter, born May 7, 1940; died February 17, 1992.

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