To her student Kazuo Ishiguro, "it was almost as if she was presenting a satirical version of herself". Some fans cherished her as a fairy godmother. For my generation, devouring her later works in the nineties, they seemed so embedded in the "new exotic" strain of English fiction they had founded, so adamantine in their brilliance, that we scarcely thought about the author herself, who died aged 51 in 1992.
Now Edmund Gordon, a young literary critic, has written the first substantial biography of Angela Carter. It's long overdue, although Carter's friend, editor Susannah Clapp, did publish an excellent, affectionate small portrait, A Postcard from Angela Carter, in 2012. Gordon's postmodern-ish approach is to not try to reconcile the different Carters. Instead he celebrates a mercurial personality, who recognised femininity as a "social fiction" and used it as licence for boundless invention of both books and self.
Carter was born in London to a Fleet Street night editor and a warm but neurotic mother. Olive's mollycoddling was suffocating; she refused to let Angela use the bathroom alone well into her teens in case she slipped or drowned. Gordon finds cause in this fear of engulfment – fairly, one thinks – for Carter's vigorous performance of individuality in later life, and tendency to bail on relationships in which she felt "taken over".
Failing to rebel sexually or to enroll in university, Carter escaped into marriage in 1960, aged 20; but not before her father found her work at The Croydon Advertiser and insisted that she take it, training that would serve her all her life. The relationship with shy industrial chemist and folk enthusiast Paul Carter failed quickly, which she attributed to his black moods, but leaving the marriage took longer. In 1969, Carter won the Somerset Maugham Award for foreign travel. When she flew to Japan only Paul thought they were still a couple. She dumped him by mail and refused to answer his calls.
Gordon's reconstruction of Carter's Japan years is fascinating. He tracks down her Japanese lover, the "radiantly unreliable" Sozo Araki (now an author) and the sadder history of her next partner, Ko, a fragile teenager who would later kill himself (Carter would speak of him guiltily in the last weeks of her life).
In Japan, Carter's real writing began; even her journal extracts are noticeably more fluid. After returning, she would publish her best work: her luminous story collection Fireworks, her nonfictional Sadeian Woman and her fairytale appropriations (The Bloody Chamber, Black Venus) that read like a primal history of the sexes. She would collaborate on a movie, The Company of Wolves, with Neil Jordan, become involved with feminist Spare Rib magazine and its publishing offshoot, Virago, and start writing for The London Review of Books (superb reviews, still to receive their due).
The last 16 years of Carter's life were happiest, spent with Mark Pearce, a quiet builder; they had a son in 1984. Yet while critical acclaim would bring travel and houses in Bath and London, Carter would watch younger writers such as Ian McEwan lauded as the edgy literary lions ("Poor Ian," she bitched to a friend, "has always been dreadfully overrated"). Her last novel, Wise Children, would bring her the most acclaim, but still wasn't shortlisted for the Booker. The Orange Prize owes its existence to her omission.
In many ways, this is a marvellous biography, especially rich on Carter's development as a writer and persona (or personas). Gordon is always nonjudgmental, but by no means credulous of Carter's more exaggerated stories. Crucially, he refuses the biographical cliche of reading work for "evidence" of how the author "really" thought, instead taking his lead from Carter – "I never believe," she wrote, "that I'm writing about the search for self."
In a charming afterword, Gordon reflects on his study. He regrets that Paul Carter wouldn't speak to him, yet never discusses the mysterious dearth of reflection from Carter's "boys" – Pearce and, especially, her son Alexander, now 22. A thinness around the historical and intellectual context, along with Gordon's aim of wresting Carter away from reductive readings (especially by her "po-faced" feminist-literary champions) mean that we don't quite end with the fullest sense of what a very big deal Carter was, and is. She remains an enigma. Yet Carter herself might have relished this. In his introduction, Gordon describes her being approached by an earnest journalist. "You just haven't got me, have you dear?" she said.