Reading List

Authors Like Angela Carter

In 1969 Angela Carter used the money from the Somerset Maugham Award, won for her novel Several Perceptions, to leave her husband and move to Tokyo. Back in England she translated the fairy tales of Charles Perrault (1977), then wrote The Sadeian Woman, a study of the Marquis de Sade, and The Bloody Chamber (1979), ten stories that take Bluebeard, Beauty and the Beast and Little Red Riding Hood back to blood and appetite. Nights at the Circus (1984), about Fevvers, a winged aerialiste at the end of the nineteenth century, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Wise Children followed in 1991. In February 1992 she died of lung cancer at her London home, aged 51. The ten writers below share her raw material: old stories, women's bodies and desire, and the question of who gets to tell the tale.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Fairy-tale retellings · Feminist Gothic · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

The closest matches to Angela Carter are Helen Oyeyemi, whose Mr Fox (2011) reworks Bluebeard, Carmen Maria Machado, whose Her Body and Other Parties (2017) turns folk tales into horror about women's bodies, and Jeanette Winterson, whose Sexing the Cherry (1989) retells the Twelve Dancing Princesses. Further down are the seventeenth-century tales Carter translated herself, and the feminist who attacked her book on Sade.

10 authors like Angela Carter

01
The tales she took apart

Charles Perrault

French · Histoires ou contes du temps passé (1697)

Perrault was born in Paris in 1628 and worked as a senior official under Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's minister. His 1697 collection, also known as the Tales of Mother Goose, fixed the literary versions of Bluebeard, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and Puss in Boots, each ending with a verse moral. He died in 1703.

Carter translated these tales in 1977, two years before The Bloody Chamber, and several of her stories answer his directly, from Bluebeard to Puss-in-Boots. Read him to see exactly what she was rewriting.

— Lisanne
02
The Gothic she grew up on

Edgar Allan Poe

American · The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840)

Poe was born in Boston in 1809 and died in Baltimore in 1849, aged 40. His tales of buried women, decaying houses and narrators who cannot be trusted shaped Gothic and horror writing for the next two centuries.

Carter wrote about him directly in ‘The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe’, a story in Black Venus (1985). Both let atmosphere do the work of plot; Poe suits readers who want the older, darker source of her Gothic.

— Lisanne

Every book by Edgar Allan Poe →

03
Old tales in a new voice

Karen Blixen

Danish · Seven Gothic Tales (1934), Out of Africa (1937)

Blixen was born in Rungsted, Denmark, in 1885 and ran a coffee farm in Kenya until 1931. Seven Gothic Tales appeared first in English, in the United States, under the pen name Isak Dinesen. Out of Africa, her memoir of the farm, has since been criticised for its colonial view of the Kenyans who worked there. She died in 1962.

Like Carter, Blixen wrote new stories in the voice of an old teller of tales, full of masquerades, aristocrats and women who outwit their fate. She suits readers who love Carter's elaborate sentences more than her shocks.

— Lisanne
04
The house as a trap

Shirley Jackson

American · The Haunting of Hill House (1959), We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)

Jackson was born in San Francisco in 1916. Her story ‘The Lottery’, published in The New Yorker in 1948, brought the magazine hundreds of letters from angry and frightened readers. She died in 1965, aged 48.

Both write Gothic fiction about women inside houses and families that close around them. Jackson is quieter and more domestic than Carter, which makes her the one to read for slow dread rather than spectacle.

— Lisanne
05
Bluebeard with a satirical eye

Margaret Atwood

Canadian · Bluebeard's Egg (1983), The Handmaid's Tale (1985), The Robber Bride (1993)

Atwood was born in Ottawa in 1939. The Robber Bride takes its title and its predatory central figure from the Grimm tale ‘The Robber Bridegroom’. She has won the Booker Prize twice, for The Blind Assassin (2000) and, jointly with Bernardine Evaristo, for The Testaments (2019).

Atwood and Carter are the two writers of their generation who most often rework fairy tales from a woman's side. Atwood stays closer to realism and satire, so she suits readers who want the old stories set in ordinary lives.

— Lisanne

Every book by Margaret Atwood →

06
Giant women and dancing princesses

Jeanette Winterson

British · Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), The Passion (1987), Sexing the Cherry (1989)

Winterson was born in Manchester in 1959 and raised by Pentecostal adoptive parents in Accrington, the background of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award. Sexing the Cherry is set in seventeenth-century London around a giant woman, the Dog-Woman, and retells the story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses.

Winterson mixes history, fable and outsized female bodies in the way Carter does in Nights at the Circus. Readers who liked Fevvers will recognise the Dog-Woman.

— Lisanne
07
The Victorian stage, from the wings

Sarah Waters

Welsh · Tipping the Velvet (1998), Fingersmith (2002)

Waters was born in Neyland, Pembrokeshire, in 1966. Tipping the Velvet follows Nan Astley, an oyster girl from Whitstable, into the music halls of the 1890s after she falls for a male impersonator. Fingersmith, a Victorian crime novel with a double twist, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize in 2002.

Waters shares Carter's late-Victorian theatres, performers and women's desire, told with a novelist's plot. She suits readers who loved the music-hall world of Nights at the Circus and Wise Children but want it more realistic.

— Lisanne

Every book by Sarah Waters →

08
The living heir to the fairy tale

Helen Oyeyemi

British · Mr Fox (2011), Boy, Snow, Bird (2014), Gingerbread (2019)

Oyeyemi was born in Nigeria in 1984 and grew up in London; her first novel, The Icarus Girl (2005), was written while she was still at school. Mr Fox is about a novelist who keeps killing off his heroines and the muse who argues back, and Boy, Snow, Bird reworks Snow White. Granta named her one of the Best of Young British Novelists in 2013.

Oyeyemi uses fairy tales as structure, not decoration, as Carter did in The Bloody Chamber. Mr Fox is the book to read next if Carter's Bluebeard story stayed with you.

— Lisanne

Every book by Helen Oyeyemi →

09
Folk tale as body horror

Carmen Maria Machado

American · Her Body and Other Parties (2017), In the Dream House (2019)

Machado was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in 1986. Her Body and Other Parties, a finalist for the National Book Award, opens with ‘The Husband Stitch’, a retelling of the old tale of the woman with a green ribbon around her neck. In the Dream House is a memoir of an abusive relationship between two women, told through the forms of genre fiction.

Machado writes about women's bodies, sex and fear through folklore and horror, which is Carter's territory brought into the twenty-first century. She suits readers who want The Bloody Chamber's nerve in a contemporary setting.

— Lisanne

Every book by Carmen Maria Machado →

10
The argument on the other side

Andrea Dworkin

American · Woman Hating (1974), Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981)

Dworkin was born in Camden, New Jersey, in 1946 and died in 2005. Woman Hating opens with a reading of fairy tales as lessons in female passivity, and Pornography: Men Possessing Women criticised Carter's The Sadeian Woman. Her 1980s campaign with Catharine MacKinnon for anti-pornography laws divided feminists, and she remains a polarising figure.

Carter read Sade as a writer who saw women as more than their biology; Dworkin saw only cruelty in the same material. Reading them side by side shows what was at stake in Carter's fairy tales about desire.

— Lisanne

Where to start if you loved Angela Carter

If you want the stories she rewrote, read Charles Perrault.

The 1697 tales behind Bluebeard and Puss in Boots; Carter's own 1977 translation is the one to find.

If you want her closest heir, read Helen Oyeyemi.

Mr Fox: a Bluebeard story in which the muse argues back.

If you want it as horror, read Carmen Maria Machado.

Her Body and Other Parties: folk tales about women's bodies, told in the present day.

If you want more of Nights at the Circus, read Jeanette Winterson.

Sexing the Cherry: seventeenth-century London, a giant woman and the Twelve Dancing Princesses.

If you have only read The Bloody Chamber, try Carter's Nights at the Circus (1984).

Her novel about Fevvers, the winged aerialiste, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Angela Carter

Who writes like Angela Carter?

Helen Oyeyemi, Carmen Maria Machado and Jeanette Winterson are the closest: all three rework fairy tales and myths around women's bodies and desire. For the older sources, read Charles Perrault and Edgar Allan Poe.

What should I read after The Bloody Chamber?

Helen Oyeyemi's Mr Fox (2011) for another Bluebeard story, and Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties (2017). Carter's own Nights at the Circus (1984) is the best next book by her.

Is Angela Carter like Margaret Atwood?

Both rework fairy tales from a woman's point of view, as in Atwood's Bluebeard's Egg (1983) and The Robber Bride (1993). Carter is more ornate and fantastical; Atwood stays closer to realism and satire.

Which Angela Carter book should I read first?

The Bloody Chamber (1979) is the usual start. Nights at the Circus (1984) is the novel to read next, and Wise Children (1991) was her last novel.

Did Angela Carter write about the Marquis de Sade?

Yes. The Sadeian Woman (1978 in the US, 1979 in the UK) reads Sade as a writer who saw women as more than their biology. Andrea Dworkin criticised it in Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981).

Is there a biography of Angela Carter?

Yes: Edmund Gordon's The Invention of Angela Carter (2016). Carter died in 1992; her collected short stories were published as Burning Your Boats in 1995.

Sources

List last reviewed 31 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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