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What Is Gothic Literature?

Gothic literature is a deliciously terrifying blend of fiction and horror with a little romance thrown in. The Gothic novel has a long history, and although it has changed since 1765 when it began with Walpole's Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, it has maintained certain classic Gothic romantic elements, through Shelley's Frankenstein of 1818 and Stoker's infamous Dracula of 1897, until today, with authors like Stephen King.

"Gothic Fiction" Is Often Called "Gothic Horror"

Elements and Conventions of Gothic Literature

Dark, Abandoned, Decaying Settings. "Gothic" also alludes to a style of grand, ornate architecture in France in the 12th century. In Gothic lit, you see lots of haunted houses, cobwebbed castles, derelict churches, and other once-glorious architecture that has fallen into disrepair. You also see dark, cramped, and claustrophobic interiors with hidden doors and secret passageways, settings with hidden skeletons. The outside world in Gothic literature is usually portrayed as being a dark, wild, and treacherous place full of wrathful weather, malevolent forests, and ghostly graveyards.

Romanticized Past. In line with its settings, Gothic lit often romanticizes and revisits the past.

Plot conventions. Common Gothic plots include revenge, familial secrets, prophecies, and curses. The past is somehow still living, breathing, and controlling the drama.

Horror. Gothic lit often elicits intense, suspenseful feelings of fear, shock, dread, or disgust in the reader.

Supernatural Beings. Monsters, demons, witches, ghosts, banshees, vampires, and other supernatural creatures often play parts in Gothic fiction.

Explorations of Romance and Sexuality. During uptight Victorian times, Gothic lit gave authors and readers an opportunity to explore romance and sexuality, and transgressive thoughts, desires, and impulses, although usually in fairly heteronormative ways. Gothic sexuality is usually somewhat repressed-women are expected to be pure and somewhat helpless while men are expected to be quietly predatory. It's also patriarchal, with men making moves and women reacting to them.

Anti-Heroes. The Gothic protagonist is often portrayed as a flawed, lonesome, isolated, or outcast figure who has to overcome obstacles in order to rejoin society.

Heavy Reliance on Symbolism. Characters, settings, and objects are weighted heavily with symbolic meaning in Gothic literature.

Common Devices, Themes, and Motifs: Curses, prophecies, hauntings, insanity, psychological flips and twists, damsels in distress, women as victims, doppelgängers, fallen societies. . . you see these often in Gothic lit.

Characteristics of the Gothic Villain or Antagonist

The Villain Is Dark and Alluring. The Gothic villain-usually male-is often extremely handsome, intelligent, successful, talented, and/or charming, although there is usually some telltale warning sign to warn us that his looks are deceiving. Gothic villains often pose as innocents or victims. (Think Lord Dracula, Heathcliff, and Dorian Gray.)

Anti-Villain. Just as the hero or protagonist is typically flawed in Gothic lit, the villain often has extremely attractive qualities. Gothic lit likes to flirt with the boundary between good and evil and keep us guessing which is which. So the good guy might look like a monster when the bad guy is a total heart- breaker. Sometimes, you'll see a villain whose complex, conflicting psychology makes him the most interesting and likable character in the story. (See Byronic hero and Satanic hero.)

Hero-Villain. A Gothic bad guy oftentimes has such such a sympathetic psychology and past that readers stop thinking in simple terms of black and white. He becomes a hybrid between bad and good.

What Is American Southern Gothic Literature?

Southern Gothic is a sub-genre of American Gothic fiction set in the South that uses ironic and macabre characters and scenes to highlight the South's implicit values and beliefs. So the purpose of Southern Gothic literature is to address the underlying social and cultural issues of the South, and this makes it slightly more political than American Gothic literature in general.

Themes of Southern Gothic Literature

Southern Gothic lit often examines falls from former glory into decay, despair, and madness, the lasting effects of slavery and racism, the trials of a dispossessed Southern aristocracy, xenophobia, and class.

Southern Gothic Settings

You'll see many rural or antique Southern settings, plantations, grand antebellum houses, and old churches.
Examples of Southern Gothic:

Dorothy Allison: Bastard Out of Carolina

Truman Capote: Other Voices, Other Rooms

Harry Crews: The Gospel Singer

William Faulkner: As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury

Charlaine Harris: Sookie Stackhouse True Blood series

Cormac McCarthy: Child of God, Blood Meridian

Carson McCullers: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe

Toni Morrison: Beloved, The Bluest Eye

Edgar Allan Poe: short stories like "Fall of the House of Usher"

Anne Rice: The Vampire Chronicles series

Eudora Welty: her novels and short stories

Where Did Gothic Literature Come From?

In many ways, the Gothic novel is a direct response to eighteenth century ideals of formal realism, which is why it is essential to understand formal realism in order to understand Gothic literature.

Formal realism is about creating a reality through the experience of one single character. It explores an individual's internal (rather than the external) drama and individual consciousness and perception. Furthermore, formal realism uses diction that is less elaborate and ornate than the literature of the past in order to reflect everyday life. Its overall goal is to educate the reader on both how to read and how to behave.

In Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel, he claims that Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Daniel Defoe are the authors of works that were the very beginnings of formal realism and the rise of the novel in eighteenth century England. He highlights how Richardson and Fielding in particular viewed themselves as the originators of a new form of writing as they turned away from the old romances. Furthermore, Watt says that

"if the novel were realistic merely because it saw life from the seamy side, it would only be an inverted romance; but in fact it surely attempts to portray all the varieties of human experience, and not merely those suited to one particular literary perspective: the novel's realism does not reside in the kind of life it presents but in the way it presents it."

Richardson's infamous novel, Pamela, and Fielding's Joseph Andrews are both clear examples of formal realism and how it portrays reality through they way the story is presented more than in the story itself.

Pamela is about the titular servant girl who finds herself in the service of a gentleman who attempts to seduce her. In the end, she gets married and becomes nobility, which is highly unrealistic for the times. However, it is presented in a series of letters with censored information (her lord is only ever called Mr. B), which seemed so real to audiences at the time that they actually believed Pamela Andrews existed.

Joseph Andrews is a response to Pamela in the form of a parody of sorts. Joseph is Pamela's brother and undergoes the same challenges in preserving his chastity as she does. In the end, he discovers he is actually of noble birth and marries a poor woman who is just as virtuous as he is. Unlike Pamela, this novel is in the form of a story told directly to the reader by the author. The use of a direct voice for the storyteller and references to the amount of research it took to find this story helps to make it seem like a real life story rather than fiction.

In the end, we must remember that Gothic lit is a response to formal realism and it strives to work in almost the complete opposite direction that formal realism did. The very basic aspect of Gothic fiction is that it does not strive to reflect everyday life, like the works of Fielding and Richardson. This is why, while reading a Gothic novel, you can expect to find ghosts and other supernatural features absent from the works of formal realism.

Elements of a Gothic Novel

Supernatural imagery. If asked to describe Gothic Literature, you might first think of dark and/or supernatural imagery, which are key devices used against the confines of realism.

Elaborate diction. Where formal realism uses simple diction, Gothic novels go elaborate.

External drama. Where formal realism focuses on the inner workings of the individual, Gothic novels home in on the environment and how all the character's actions come into play.

Romance. A Gothic novel is something of an inverted romance, as it tends to see things from the seamy side.

Blend of Fantasy and Realism. However, what makes Gothic Literature unique is not in the type of life it sees and represents but in how it blends the real with the imaginary. This blend produces terror because of the suspense and unpredictability associated with the paranormal and unknown and also makes the characters within Gothic Literature even more realistic than those in novels from other genres.

Real People in Unreal Situations. No matter how fantastical and insane the situation is, a Gothic novel's characters always react in ways that are truer to everyday responses to these circumstances than the circumstances themselves, even providing natural explanations for what the reader knows is supernatural. This is a key element in Gothic Literature. Its blend of realism and fantasy means that the characters are developed as true to what they would be in the real world while they are place in situations that are completely unreal. To put it simply, Gothic Literature is about how real people react in unreal situations. For example, if a monk is offered a deal with the Devil he can't refuse, will he take it or just walk away?

In the end, it's pretty safe to say that the works of Gothic literature do everything formal realism would not even touch, which can either delight those readers who hate formal realism or disgust them with stories that seem too ridiculous to take seriously.

Top Ten Gothic Novels

What Is a Gothic Novel?

Robert D. Hume claims that a Gothic novel "can be seen as one symptom of a widespread shift away from neoclassical ideals of order and reason, toward romantic belief in emotion and imagination."

Features of Gothic Literature
© 2012 Lisa
. on May 07, 2020:

Really helpful

Kawerick Roch on April 07, 2020:

Hello, this has proved useful for me in my writing.

hi on March 11, 2020:

good

Someone on December 08, 2019:

I have a test :) It is really going to help me pass

JKRowl on November 09, 2019:

This is great inspiration for all of my books. I may write a 9th

Someone on October 13, 2019:

Thank you

Arc on October 09, 2019:

This is literally the description of all my characters backstories

stefano_berry on February 26, 2019:

you are just the best. Thank you, it really helped me

Isha on February 18, 2019:

Your work is really appreciated in India. Me and my friends were preparing for exam...we loved your work. Thank you.

Dig Bick on February 06, 2019:

Very good

Whizz on December 01, 2018:

I thought it was great. Had homework to research this and talk about it in English. Nice not to have to visit loads of sites. Thanks

Ben Dover on November 07, 2018:

Helpfulish

One Dude on October 29, 2018:

Stuff is dummy boring, worst English project i have had to do

Raj Kumar on October 04, 2018:

Could you please make a notes on "the 18th century novel" and "Victorian women novel". Only definition, features and criticism.

Neveen Badr on September 11, 2018:

Thank you so much for summing up the Gothic Literature topics and elements into one article.

Nandakumar on July 12, 2018:

Hai, Lisa I have gone through your article it's nice and useful for me please try to include more information without increasing the size of the article.

Emre on May 07, 2018:

thank you very much. it is very clear to understand and it is really successful research.

nate on April 23, 2018:

bruv this just got me through some boring english research stuff. big ups to you man

Neveen on March 16, 2018:

I want to tell you that it was benefit for me in my study. Thank you .

IT on February 21, 2018:

Really helpful

Denise M. Baran-Unland on February 07, 2018:

Great post, extremely spot-on. This is my favorite genre to read (and write) when the story is written well. I have shared this post with my followers and the writer's group I co-lead.

Dominique Cantin-Meaney from Montreal, Canada on January 06, 2015:

Thank for sharing. It was well written, and very informative.

Nicole Quaste from Philadelphia, PA on July 31, 2013:

This is a really great hub. You write so clearly, and I really enjoyed reading it. Gothic literature is one of, if not my favorite, genre. Your point about Gothic literature being a blend of the real and imaginary is a good one and I always saw this the most in Wuthering Heights. The love in the novel is so real. The jealousy, revenge, and passion are true human realities, yet there are the grotesque fantastical elements as well.

Martin Kloess from San Francisco on June 11, 2012:

good job on this. thank you

Lisa (author) from WA on June 11, 2012:

Thanks :) I think I would've tried becoming a teacher but I'm so shy I'm not sure I'd be very successful communicating in person like I can on paper.

Suzette Walker from Taos, NM on June 11, 2012:

Well done and well written, Lisa! You are very knowledgeable in the area of literature. In fact, you would make a great literature teacher on the high school or university level. I don't know if that is of any interest to you, but students would be interested in you and your approach to literature. I enjoyed this article very much!

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Gothic Literature: A Definition and List of Gothic Fiction Elements

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Gothic literature is a deliciously terrifying blend of fiction and horror with a little romance thrown in. The Gothic novel has a long history, and although it has changed since 1765 when it began with Walpole's Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, it has maintained certain classic Gothic romantic elements, through Shelley's Frankenstein of 1818 and Stoker's infamous Dracula of 1897, until today, with authors like Stephen King.

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Don't loiter, girl! Do you think I shall lose appetite for the meal if you are so long about serving it? No; I shall grow hungrier, more ravenous with each moment, more cruel... Run to me, run! I have a place prepared for your exquisite corpse in my display of flesh!

This extract from The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter is on display by the painting.

The Bloody Chamber is based on the story of Bluebeard, a wealthy-beyond-the -dreams- of-avarice French nobleman who married a 17 year old girl, a talented pianist, and whisked her off to his remote castle. There she discovers his passion for sadistic pornography and his pleasure at her humiliation and pain. He sets up a trap which leads to her discovery of a chamber containing the bodies of his previous wives. In Carter's version, narrated by the child bride herself, before the Marquis can add her to his collection of corpses she is rescued. A blind piano tuner seen on the right of the picture plays his part but it is her magnificent feisty mother who, arriving on horseback, does not hesitate to 'put a single irreproachable bullet through the Marquis's head'.

Traditional fairy tales have been described as the science fiction of the past. Certainly the novelist and short story writer Angela Carter used them to explore how things might be different. Her unforgettable rich gothic imagery draws from 'subterranean areas behind everyday experience', which Jones depicts so exquisitely in her arresting picture.

Karen Jones captures the essence of this horrific tale. The Marquis stands with a strong grip upon his weapon. The unnamed heroine carries the ring of keys which, by unlocking the bloody chamber, awakens her to the peril she is in. She wears a collar like a dog - albeit one made of blood-red rubies - 'coiled like a snake about to strike'. And what about those lilies? They are everywhere. When the Marquis proposes, 'he seemed to me like a lily...possessed of that strange ominous calm of a sentient vegetable, like one of those cobra-headed, funereal lilies whose white sheaths are curled out of a flesh as thick and tensely yielding to the touch as vellum'. When falling asleep the last thing she remembers is 'a tall jar of lilies beside the bed , how the thick glass distorted their fat stems so they looked like arms, dismembered arms, drifting drowned in greenish water'.

I'm reminded of American Gothic, an oil painting by Grant Wood. Is it a neat inversion of Jones' picture? (It's one of the top three paintings that every American is said to know. The others are Mona Lisa and Whistler's Mother). Both couples stand to attention in period dress. Here the man on the right is not lusting after the woman. He's her father, gripping a rigid pitchfork, a weapon useful for 'defending the virtue of his not very alluring daughter' (the artist's sister), according to the art critic Robert Hughes. The pitchfork, which is so central to the painting, is usually 'Satan's archetypal tool for tossing souls into eternal fire, but here it becomes the weapon against Satan'. Opinion is divided as to whether Grant is underlining or undermining the values of his Iowan ancestry. Is he shyly poking fun at intolerance, rigidity and moral vigilance - or upholding traditional values?

No such ambiguity exists in Karen Jones' painting (or Angela Carter's story. The Bloody Chamber - a reference to the womb? - is visceral, chilling, intriguing. Not the sort of image you would easily forget.

The EroticaArt2012 exhibition, in which it is displayed, has two aims: to showcase the work of emerging and established artists and to raise funds for FPA, a sexual health charity. Its aims are to see fewer unwanted pregnancies in the UK, lower rates of sexual infection and for parents and children to be more able to talk about growing up.

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Don't loiter, girl! Do you think I shall lose appetite for the meal if you are so long about serving it? No; I shall grow hungrier, more ravenous with each moment, more cruel... Run to me, run! I have a place prepared for your exquisite corpse in my display of flesh!

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A beautiful teenage girl, marries an older, wealthy French Marquis, whom she does not love. He gifts her a choker made of rubies, warning her against taking it off. A beautiful teenage girl, marries an older, wealthy French Marquis, whom she does not love. He gifts her a choker made of rubies, warning her against taking it off. A beautiful teenage girl, marries an older, wealthy French Marquis, whom she does not love. He gifts her a choker made of rubies, warning her against taking it off.

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The Bloody Chamber: Directed by Nick Lewin. With Rupert Everett, Suzanna Hamilton, Judy Parfitt, Terence Stamp. A beautiful teenage girl, marries an older, wealthy French Marquis, whom she does not love. He gifts her a choker made of rubies, warning her against taking it off.

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Table of Contents

Angela Carter, original name Angela Olive Stalker, (born May 7, 1940, Eastbourne, Sussex, Eng.-died Feb. 16, 1992, London), British author who reshaped motifs from mythology, legends, and fairy tales in her books, lending them a ghastly humour and eroticism.

Carter rejected an Oxford education to work as a journalist with the Croydon Advertiser, but she later studied medieval literature at the University of Bristol (B.A., 1965). She had moderate success with her novels Shadow Dance (1966; also published as Honeybuzzard) and The Magic Toyshop (1967; filmed 1986). Her other novels include Several Perceptions (1968), The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), The Passion of New Eve (1977), and Wise Children (1991). Carter's fiction gained new popularity in the 1980s, notably after the release of the motion picture The Company of Wolves (1984), which she cowrote; the film was based on a story from The Bloody Chamber (1979), a collection of her adaptations of fairy tales. Her interest in the macabre and the sensual was reflected in The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (1979), a polemical study of the female characters in the writings of the marquis de Sade. She also wrote radio plays, children's books, and essays.

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Angela Carter, original name Angela Olive Stalker, (born May 7, 1940, Eastbourne, Sussex, Eng.-died Feb. 16, 1992, London), British author who reshaped motifs from mythology, legends, and fairy tales in her books, lending them a ghastly humour and eroticism.

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When Angela Carter died - aged just 51, on 16 February 1992 - her reputation changed from cultish to canonical. Her obituaries in the British press received more space than any others that year except Francis Bacon, Willy Brandt and Marlene Dietrich. Their tone was rhapsodic. "Angela Carter ... was one of the most important writers at work in the English language." "She interpreted the times for us with unrivalled penetration." "Her imagination was one of the most dazzling of this century." Three days after she died, Virago, the publishing house with which her name was most closely associated, sold out of her books. Over the course of the next academic year, the British Academy received 40 proposals for doctoral research into her work - compared with three on the literature of the entire 18th century.

Her friends and long-term admirers regarded this torrent of posthumous acclaim with a touch of exasperation. For more than 25 years Carter had been producing novels, short stories, drama and journalism that stood defiantly apart from the work of her contemporaries. At a time when English literature was dominated by sober social realists, she played with disreputable genres - gothic horror, science fiction, fairytale - and gave free rein to the fantastic and the surreal. Her work is funny, sexy, frightening and brutal, and is always shaped by a keen, subversive intelligence and a style of luxuriant beauty. She was concerned with unpicking the mythic roles and structures that underwrite our existences - in particular the various myths of gender identity - and by the end of her life she was starting to acquire a devoted following. But only once her voice had been silenced was she accorded the status of a great novelist and feminist icon.

At a time when English literature was full of sober social realists, she gave free rein to the fantastic and the surreal

As Carter's first biographer, a large part of my task has been trying to look beyond some of the certainties that have settled around her since her death - to see her once again as mutable, vulnerable, unfinished. "I'm in the demythologising business," she once wrote, and as I worked on my book, my purpose increasingly became to demythologise her: to recapture the fluidity of her identity and the unpredictability of her mind, and in doing so, to tell a story about how she came to write some of the liveliest and most original books of the last hundred years.

ne of the central themes of Carter's writing is the contingency of personal identity. She believed that our selves are neither false nor true, but merely roles we either master or are mastered by. Her characters wear their personalities like fancy dress costumes. She was explicit about viewing femininity as a "social fiction", part of a culturally choreographed performance of selfhood. She wasn't the first to make this observation - but she may have been the first to greet it so warmly, as a licence for boundless self-invention.

The story of her life is the story of how she invented herself, of how she progressed from a shy, introverted childhood, through a nervy, defiantly unconventional youth, to a happy, self-confident middle age. She consistently flouted expectations of women, creating instead, by sheer force of will, the lifestyle and circumstances that suited her. It wasn't a straightforward process. Born in 1940 - just before the Luftwaffe unleashed its first wave of bombs over Britain - she grew up in the shabbily respectable south London district of Balham, the second child of an eccentric journalist father and a neurotic housewife mother. As a young girl she was spoiled and zealously sheltered by her parents, and in particular by her mother, who placed a handkerchief behind Angela's head whenever she sat down in a public place, rubbed so much Zam-Buk ointment on her chest that her top was permanently stained green, and indulged her with so many edible treats that by the time she left primary school she was extremely overweight. (Not an easy thing to achieve in a decade when meat, sugar, chocolate, butter, cheese and cooking fat were all strictly rationed.)

As she approached adolescence, her mother's obsessive cosseting only became more pronounced. Even when she was 10 or 11, Angela wasn't allowed to go to the lavatory on her own. She was made to wash with the bathroom door open well into her teens. Her mother was terrified that some catastrophe would befall her if she let her out of her sight: she would slip and injure herself, or drown in the tub.

Tom Bell as Uncle Philip in the film adaptation of The Magic Toyshop (1987). Photograph: ITV / Rex Features

When she was 17 decided that the time had come to put some emotional distance between herself and her mother. She sought a doctor's advice about losing weight and was put on a rigorous diet: at the start of 1958, she weighed something between 13 and 15 stone; by that summer, she was around 10 stone. She also took up swearing and smoking, both of which dismayed her socially conservative parents (as she had calculated that they would), and began choosing her own clothes, opting for close-fitting black garments that were "a positive sign of depravity" in the late 1950s (a typical outfit consisted of "black-mesh stockings, spike-heeled shoes, bum-hugging skirt, jacket with a black fox collar"). It was the first of many times when, faced with adverse or repressive circumstances, she forcibly asserted her identity.

But on that first occasion she may have exerted too much force: her weight loss seems to have accelerated into anorexia shortly after she left school. By then she was working as a journalist - an overwhelmingly male profession in the late 1950s - on a local south London paper, which, she wrote, "functioned as a kind of benign day-clinic, where my patent insanity was taken in good part". One of her duties was writing the paper's music reviews: that was probably how she first encountered Paul Carter, an industrial chemist by profession, but also an amateur producer and recordist of folk records, whom she later remembered as being "a simple, artsy Soho 50s beatnik". Through him, she became involved in the English folk revival (she wrote sleeve notes to several of the records he produced, performed with him at singarounds, and even briefly ran a folk club with him) and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He represented a clear escape route from her parents' home: shortly after her 19th birthday, she accepted his proposal of marriage.

When Paul was offered a lectureship in chemistry at the newly formed Bristol Technical College in 1961, Carter quit her job and went with him. But the marriage soon faltered. Paul had a depressive streak, and had quickly begun to exhibit what Carter came to know as his "indrawn moods", which could last for days at a time. These moods were extremely difficult for her, not least because she felt (or was made to feel) that she was responsible for them. And after she began publishing novels (her first, Shadow Dance, a gothic murder story set in a distinctly Bristol-like city, appeared in 1966), his silences lengthened: she told a friend that he didn't speak to her for three weeks after one of her books came out. "I admit it," she wrote in her journal less than two years after their wedding. "Marriage was one of my typical burn-all-bridges-but-one acts; flight from a closed room into another one." By her mid-20s, she was already plotting her second escape from an oppressive domestic situation.

In 1969 she received the Somerset Maugham award for her third novel, Several Perceptions. The rules (laid down by Maugham himself) stipulated that the money had to be spent on foreign travel. Carter decided to visit Japan. Shortly after arriving in Tokyo (which she thought was "the most absolutely non-boring city in the world"), she met a 24-year-old Japanese man who was hoping to become a novelist. After breaking up with Paul by letter, she lived with the man for the best part of a year. When the relationship ended she moved in with a 19-year-old Korean man, while working for a period in a hostess bar. The two years that she spent in Japan were among the most crucial periods of Carter's life, one of the great hinges on which her story turns: she wrote two of her most dazzling books, The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman (1972) and Fireworks (1974) while living there. Her new sense of personal independence had given rise to a new artistic freedom.

After returning to Britain in 1972, she lived in London (renting the spare room of the poet Fleur Adcock for a while) and became increasingly interested in the emerging women's liberation movement. She always felt happier "sniping from the sidelines" than toeing the party line, however. "I suspect," she told an interviewer, "that when my sisters think of me, they see me as a bit of an Uncle Tom. I think it's all terrible. I think it's terrible for everyone, not just women." Carter's 1979 work of cultural history, The Sadeian Woman - in which she used the Marquis de Sade as her exemplar of a "moral" pornographer - was dismissed by the radical critic Andrea Dworkin as "pseudofeminist". (It was also stickered by the Federation of Alternative Bookshops for having an offensive cover: a painting by the surrealist artist Clovis Trouille featuring several half-naked women, some of whom are being whipped.) Even so, she found one of her closest friends and most ardent supporters in Carmen Callil, the founder of the feminist publishing house Virago.

At the same time as writing for Spare Rib she was selling erotic short stories to men's soft porn magazines

During this period, Carter had a series of disastrous love affairs, and at least one abortion, while living hand to mouth on the proceeds of journalism and the odd royalty cheque from her early novels. After one particularly tempestuous relationship ended she fled London for Bath, and her father loaned her the money to buy herself a small house in the city (her mother having died in 1969).

She eventually found domestic happiness with her second husband, Mark Pearce. He was a builder, 15 years her junior; they met when he was constructing an extension for the house opposite hers in Bath. She ran across the street to ask for his help with a plumbing emergency. "He came in," she told her friends, "and never left."

arter was deliberately messy, awkward, even paradoxical in her behaviour: she never allowed herself to settle into any predictable guise or attitude for long. At the same time in the 1970s as she was writing for the feminist magazine Spare Rib, she was also contributing smutty articles and erotic short stories to the soft porn magazines Men Only and Club International. She voted Labour and loathed Margaret Thatcher, but when she attended a meeting of leftwing writers and intellectuals in 1988, she felt badly out of place, and barely said a word. She refused identification with any movement, and resisted attempts to absorb her work into any genre (she always denied that she was a magical realist, for example, arguing that the phrase was meaningless when used outside the specific context of Latin American literature). She believed that "integration means giving up one's freedom of being, in that one becomes mastered by one's role".

Micha Bergese and Sarah Patterson in the film adaptation of The Company of Wolves (1984). Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

But if we invent ourselves, we also invent one another - and writers' personalities can quickly solidify in the popular imagination, especially once they're no longer around to surprise us with new work. As Auden wrote of Yeats's death: "he became his admirers". Carter has become hers in ways that have often ignored her wish not to be defined by her roles. Her obituaries demonstrated an impulse towards myth-making and sanctification. They emphasised her gentleness, her wisdom and her "magical" imagination, at the expense of her intellectual sharpness, her taste for violent and disturbing imagery, and her exuberant sensuality.

"She had something of the faerie queene about her," wrote Marina Warner in the Independent, "except that she was never wispy or fey." In the New York Times, Salman Rushdie identified her straightforwardly with "the fairy queen", adding that "English literature has lost its high sorceress, its benevolent white witch". Margaret Atwood, writing in the Observer, went even further: "The amazing thing about her, for me, was that someone who looked so much like the fairy godmother ... should actually be so much like the fairy godmother. She seemed always on the verge of bestowing something - some talisman, some magic token you'd need to get through the dark forest, some verbal formula useful for the opening of charmed doors."

This mythic version of Carter soon became the prevailing one. But the otherworldly figure conjured by her obituarists doesn't do justice to her complexity. Her fundamental vigour, determination and courage all emerge powerfully from the story of her life; her wild, often gleefully crass sense of humour and her strong sexual energy are both conspicuous in her books; and her quick wit and personal charm are apparent in surviving TV footage. In her 40s, newly confident, Carter allowed her hair to turn grey, and grew it down to her shoulders. She became a mother just as she began to look like the cartoon image of a grandmother: her son, Alexander, was born in 1983. He brought her a great deal of joy, and the last decade of her life was also the happiest. She returned to live in south London, not far from where she had grown up, and between teaching stints in Australia and the US she produced some of her richest and most affecting work, including the screenplay for the Neil Jordan film The Company of Wolves (1984), which was based on one of her short stories, and the novels Nights at the Circus (1984) and Wise Children (1991). As her friend Lorna Sage observed: "by the end her life fitted her more or less like a glove. But that's because she put it together, by trial and error, bricolage, all in the (conventionally) wrong order."

Edmund Gordon's The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography is published by Chatto & Windus on 13 October. To order a copy for £20.50 (RRP £25) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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The otherworldly figure conjured after her death in 1992 doesn't do Angela Carter justice. Her biographer Edmund Gordon attempts a more accurate portrayal of a complex, sensual and highly intellectual woman

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fairytalemood_ “The Bloody Chamber” by Erika Steiskal

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Analysis of Bloody Chamber A Bloody and Frightening Tale AQA Lit B English Exam Gothic (1)

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Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber reimagined_ the Book Illustration competition 2012 shortlist