Book review: A Card From Angela Carter

By LEE RANDALL
Published on Monday 6 February 2012 00:00

FANS of the late Angela Carter – who include this reviewer – will welcome this slender tome, which offers a vivid sketch of her life and work via the postcards she sent to her friend, literary executor, and sometime editor, Susannah Clapp.

Many of the postcards are reproduced, too, in black-and-white.

Carter, who died at 51, having written 15 works of fiction and many essays, pops off the page precisely because we are not bogged down with a wealth of biographical data. Instead, to chose one example, a precis description of her last home shows her to have been a decorating maximalist who loved eye-popping hues.

A postcard depicting a clutch of dolls inspires the recollection that Carter wrote that velvet and suede can simulate skin they cover. This segues into recollections about how alien Carter felt when she was with her Japanese lover (taken while in flight from her first husband): like “a kind of phoenix, a fabulous beast; I was an outlandish jewel. He found me, I think, inexpressibly exotic. But I often felt like a female impersonator.”

Amid the insights and giggles – Carter had a wonderful wit – comes the description of a never-written novel called Adela, in which Carter planned to take her thesis that Mr Rochester’s ward was actually his daughter. She was to play with the characters from Jane Eyre, and depict the Franco-Prussian wars and the seige of Paris. How sad not to have that to read!

Where this book suffers, paradoxically, is in its intimacy. Readers unfamiliar with London’s literary scene might struggle to identify some of the names Clapp drops. It’s like walking in on a conversation that’s been on the go for years, which, of course, it has.

On the whole, however, this is a delightful gem, an ancillary to the as yet unwritten comprehensive biography that Carter is surely overdue.

• A Card From Angela Carter

Susannah Clapp

Bloomsbury, £10

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