Angela Carter

SARAH GAMBLE is Senior Lecturer in English and Gender at the University of Wales, Swansea, UK. She is the author of Angela Carter: Writing from the Front Line and the editor of Angela Carter: A Reader's Guide to Essential Criticism. In addition, she is the editor of The Routledge Companion to Feminism and Postfeminism. She has also published essays on a variety of contemporary women writers, including Pat Barker and Carol Shields.

'Placing the work of an author like Angela Carter who consistently plays around with the notion of the writing self and whose own autobiographical essays and statements are not to be entirely trusted within its biographical and cultural contexts is a demanding project. In Angela Carter: A Literary Life, Sarah Gamble rises to the challenge, demonstrating convincingly that Carter's portrayal of the self as provisional and contingent does not mean that we cannot make connections between her art and her life. Gamble's emphasis upon Carter as an astute observer of the societies in which she lived and worked is a refreshing perspective on a writer more commonly associated with fantasy than political comment.' - Professor Linden Peach, University of Gloucestershire, UK 'Angela Carter: A Literary Life offers insight for appreciating Carter's style, but more importantly it demonstrates Carter's relationship to the social and historical contexts within which she wrote. As part of Palgrave's Literary Lives series, Gamble's book establishes these contexts through careful reasoning and thorough research... Gamble's method provides a thoughtful and coherent reading of Carter's major works.' - Carolyn Perry, Literature& History, 2008

• Acknowledgements Introduction: Is She Fact or Is She Fiction? Alienated is the Only Way to Be I'm a Sucker for the Worker Hero What Were the Sixties Really Like A Quite Different Reality My Now Stranger's Eye You Write from Your Own History Conclusion: Posthumous Fame is No Comfort at All Notes Bibliography Index