Author Guide · Fiction & Fairy Tales
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In 1969 Angela Carter took the money from a Somerset Maugham Award, left her husband and went to Tokyo. She stayed about two years, and later wrote that in Japan she “learnt what it is to be a woman and became radicalised.” Born in Eastbourne in 1940, she had started out as a reporter on the Croydon Advertiser, studied English at Bristol, and published three novels by the age of twenty-eight. What followed were a ruined England, a city attacked by a doctor’s dream machines, a woman with wings in a travelling circus, and The Bloody Chamber (1979), ten fairy tales told again with their teeth showing. She died of lung cancer in London in 1992, aged 51; in 2008 The Times ranked her tenth among the greatest British writers since 1945. This guide covers her 10 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 10 key books · 1966–1991 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Angela Carter published nine novels, from Shadow Dance (1966) to Wise Children (1991), and the story collection The Bloody Chamber (1979), her best-known book. Nights at the Circus (1984) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Start with The Bloody Chamber, then read Nights at the Circus. Below are all ten in order, plus her other stories, essays and fairy-tale books.
Where to Start with Angela Carter
If you want the book everyone means
→ The Bloody Chamber (1979) — Bluebeard, Beauty and the Beast and Red Riding Hood, retold.
If you want her big novel
→ Nights at the Circus (1984) — a winged aerialiste on a circus tour to Siberia.
If you want something funny
→ Wise Children (1991) — twin chorus girls on their seventy-fifth birthday.
If you want an early, shorter novel
→ The Magic Toyshop (1967) — a girl sent to live above a toyshop in South London.
10 Angela Carter Books, in Order
Shadow Dance
Her first novel, published by Heinemann and in the US as Honeybuzzard. In a run-down English town Morris, a failed painter, runs a junk shop with his friend Honeybuzzard, who has slashed the face of Ghislaine, a former beauty Morris once slept with. The two keep scavenging empty houses as Honeybuzzard’s cruelty grows. Anthony Burgess praised her “capacity for looking at the mess of contemporary life without flinching.”
The Magic Toyshop
After her parents die in a plane crash, teenage Melanie and her brother and sister are sent to South London to live with Uncle Philip, a tyrannical maker of toys and puppets, his mute wife Margaret and Margaret’s younger brother Finn. Melanie is put to work in the shop and in Philip’s puppet theatre. Carter wrote the screenplay for the 1987 film directed by David Wheatley.
Several Perceptions
Joseph Harker, a university drop-out in Bristol who calls himself a nihilist, survives a suicide attempt early in the book. In loose episodes he falls for his best friend’s mother, frees a badger from the zoo and posts his own excrement to President Lyndon B. Johnson, before his friends take him back at an anarchic Christmas party. The prize money took Carter to Japan.
Heroes and Villains
In an England after catastrophe, the Professors live in a walled tower guarded by Soldiers while Barbarians raid from the woods outside. Marianne, a Professor’s daughter, escapes with Jewel, a tattooed Barbarian boy, into a violent and erotic life beyond the fence. The book mixes post-apocalyptic fiction with Gothic romance.
Love
Annabel, a fearful young artist, shares two rooms with her husband Lee and his brother Buzz, a sharp, self-absorbed man with a camera. Lee’s affair with another woman tips the triangle towards disaster, and the novel ends in tragedy. With Shadow Dance and Several Perceptions it is sometimes called her “Bristol trilogy”.
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
Doctor Hoffman’s machines fill the capital of an unnamed Latin American country with illusions, and a government minister sends Desiderio to find and kill him. His journey passes through a peep show, a travelling carnival and a tribe of centaurs, and he falls in love with Hoffman’s daughter Albertina. Published in the US as The War of Dreams; Jeff VanderMeer called it “the finest surrealist novel of the past 30 years.”
The Passion of New Eve
Evelyn, a young Englishman, arrives in a New York collapsing into civil war. He flees into the desert, where, in the underground city of Beulah, a surgeon-goddess called Mother turns him into a woman, Eve. Eve is then taken by the cult leader Zero and goes in search of Tristessa, the silent film star Evelyn adored as a boy. Carter called it a feminist black comedy.
The Bloody Chamber
Ten stories that rework old tales: Bluebeard in the title story, Beauty and the Beast twice, Puss in Boots, the Erl-King, Sleeping Beauty as a vampire, and three wolf stories from Little Red Riding Hood, including “The Company of Wolves”. It won the Cheltenham Festival Literary Prize. Neil Jordan’s 1984 film The Company of Wolves, co-written by Carter, grew from the wolf stories.
Nights at the Circus
Sophie Fevvers, a celebrated aerialiste with real wings, or so she says, tells her life story to the American journalist Jack Walser: a winged foundling, she claims, raised in a London brothel. Walser joins Colonel Kearney’s circus to follow her to St Petersburg and across Siberia at the end of the century. It won the James Tait Black Prize in 1984 and in 2012 was named the best winner in the prize’s history; Kneehigh staged it in 2006.
Wise Children
Her last novel. On 23 April, Shakespeare’s birthday, the twin chorus girls Dora and Nora Chance turn seventy-five in London, and their father, the great Shakespearean actor Melchior Hazard, who never acknowledged them, turns one hundred. Dora tells the family’s theatrical history, legitimate and illegitimate, up to his birthday party. Emma Rice adapted it for the Old Vic in 2018.
In What Order to Read Angela Carter
None of Carter’s books are sequels, so you can read them in any order. Publication order does show a change. The first three novels, Shadow Dance, The Magic Toyshop and Several Perceptions, are set in a recognisable 1960s England, run-down and bohemian. From Heroes and Villains (1969) onwards the worlds turn fantastic: a ruined England, a city under a dream war, an America at war with itself.
The Bloody Chamber (1979) sits at the centre and is the easiest way in, because each story is short and starts from a tale you already know. After it, the last two novels, Nights at the Circus and Wise Children, are her warmest and funniest books, both told in big, talking first-person voices. Leave The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and The Passion of New Eve, her most difficult novels, until you know her style.
A reading path
1. The Bloody Chamber (1979)
2. Nights at the Circus (1984)
3. Wise Children (1991)
4. The Magic Toyshop (1967)
5. The Passion of New Eve (1977)
Everything Else Angela Carter Published
Beyond the 10 key books: 22 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Short story collections
4
4 books · 1974–1995
- 1974Fireworksnine “profane pieces”, several drawn from her time in Japan
- 1985Black Venusstories, published in the US as Saints and Strangers
- 1993American Ghosts and Old World Wondersher last stories, published after her death
- 1995Burning Your Boatsher collected short stories
Nonfiction and journalism
4
4 books · 1979–1997
- 1979The Sadeian Womanan essay on the Marquis de Sade and the ideology of pornography
- 1982Nothing Sacredselected writings and journalism
- 1992Expletives Deletedselected writings
- 1997Shaking a Legher collected journalism and writing
Fairy tales, edited and translated
6
6 books · 1977–2005
- 1977The Fairy Tales of Charles Perraulther translation of Perrault
- 1982Sleeping Beauty and Other Favourite Fairy Talestranslated and adapted, illustrated by Michael Foreman
- 1986Wayward Girls and Wicked Womenan anthology of stories
- 1990The Virago Book of Fairy Talesa collection of fairy tales she edited
- 1992The Second Virago Book of Fairy Talesthe follow-up volume
- 2005Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Talesthe two Virago volumes in one
Children’s books
5
5 books · 1970–2000
- 1970The Donkey Princeillustrated by Eros Keith
- 1970Miss Z, the Dark Young Ladyillustrated by Eros Keith
- 1979Comic and Curious Catsillustrated by Martin Leman
- 1982Moonshadowillustrated by Justin Todd
- 2000Sea-Cat and Dragon Kingillustrated by Eva Tatcheva
Drama and poetry
3
3 books · 1985–2015
- 1985Come Unto These Yellow Sandsfour radio plays
- 1996The Curious Roomplays, film scripts and an opera
- 2015Unicornher collected poetry
The years · 1940–1992
Quick facts about Angela Carter
- Known for
- Dark, funny, sensual fiction that turns fairy tales, Gothic and the circus into stories about women, desire and power.
- 1940
- Born in Eastbourne
- 1966
- First novel, Shadow Dance
- 1969
- Moves to Tokyo
- 1992
- Dies in London, aged 51
- Born
- Angela Olive Stalker, 7 May 1940, Eastbourne; her father was a journalist
- Education
- Streatham and Clapham High School; University of Bristol, English literature
- Early career
- Reporter on the Croydon Advertiser
- Japan
- Lived in Tokyo for about two years from 1969
- Teaching
- Writer in residence at Sheffield (1976–78), Brown, Adelaide and the University of East Anglia
- Prizes
- John Llewellyn Rhys Prize; Somerset Maugham Award; James Tait Black Memorial Prize (1984)
- Died
- 16 February 1992, London, of lung cancer
The red mark is 1979: The Bloody Chamber, the fairy-tale collection that made her name.
How Angela Carter Writes: The Latent Content
Carter took old stories apart to find what was already inside them. Of The Bloody Chamber she said her aim was not to write “versions” of fairy tales but “to extract the latent content from the traditional stories”: the sex, money and violence the nursery versions keep quiet. In several stories the heroine faces the beast and, rather than being rescued, chooses him.
Her prose is ornate, full of objects and literary borrowings, from Sade and Shakespeare to E. T. A. Hoffmann, Perrault and Hollywood. The early novels use this Gothic style on ordinary 1960s England; from Heroes and Villains on, she builds whole invented worlds. In her last two novels the voice changes again: Fevvers in Nights at the Circus and Dora Chance in Wise Children are loud, comic narrators who may not be telling the truth.
Her two years in Japan, she wrote, radicalised her as a woman, and her later work keeps returning to how women are looked at and how they perform: puppets in The Magic Toyshop, a film star in The Passion of New Eve, an aerialiste, two chorus girls. She also taught: at the University of East Anglia one of her students was Kazuo Ishiguro.
Watch
Angela Carter and Neil Jordan on The Company of Wolves
Interviewed with the director Neil Jordan for Channel 4’s Visions, first shown in October 1984, Carter talks about turning her wolf stories from The Bloody Chamber into the film The Company of Wolves.
Frequently asked questions about Angela Carter’s books
How many books has Angela Carter written?
Nine novels, from Shadow Dance (1966) to Wise Children (1991), and five story collections, of which The Bloody Chamber (1979) is on this page and Fireworks, Black Venus, American Ghosts and Old World Wonders and the collected Burning Your Boats are in the bibliography. She also wrote four books of nonfiction and journalism, five children’s books, and edited or translated six books of fairy tales.
What are Angela Carter’s books in order?
Shadow Dance (1966), The Magic Toyshop (1967), Several Perceptions (1968), Heroes and Villains (1969), Love (1971), The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), The Passion of New Eve (1977), The Bloody Chamber (1979), Nights at the Circus (1984) and Wise Children (1991).
Where should I start with Angela Carter?
With The Bloody Chamber. The stories are short and each starts from a fairy tale you already know, so it is the quickest way into her style. If you want a novel, start with Nights at the Circus, or Wise Children if you want her at her funniest.
What is Angela Carter’s most famous book?
The Bloody Chamber (1979), her ten retold fairy tales, including the Bluebeard story of the title and “The Company of Wolves”. It won the Cheltenham Festival Literary Prize and is widely studied. Among the novels, Nights at the Circus (1984) is the best known: in 2012 it was named the best ever winner of the James Tait Black Prize.
Which of Angela Carter’s books have been adapted?
The Company of Wolves (1984), directed by Neil Jordan and co-written by Carter, is based on the wolf stories in The Bloody Chamber. Carter also wrote the screenplay for The Magic Toyshop (1987), directed by David Wheatley. On stage, Kneehigh adapted Nights at the Circus in 2006, and Emma Rice’s Wise Children opened at the Old Vic in 2018.
Is Angela Carter still alive?
No. She died of lung cancer at her home in London on 16 February 1992, aged 51. Her last stories, American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (1993), and her collected stories, Burning Your Boats (1995), were published after her death. In 2019 English Heritage put up a blue plaque at her house in Clapham, where she lived for sixteen years.
Was Angela Carter controversial?
At times. The Sadeian Woman (1979), an essay arguing that the Marquis de Sade’s writing could be of use to feminists, was controversial when it appeared. Her Channel 4 documentary The Holy Family Album (1991), which treated paintings of Christ as photographs in God’s family album, was criticised in a Times editorial before it was broadcast; a complaint to the Broadcasting Standards Commission was not upheld.
What are the “Bristol trilogy” novels?
Shadow Dance (1966), Several Perceptions (1968) and Love (1971) are sometimes grouped as her “Bristol trilogy”; Several Perceptions is set in Bristol, where she studied. They are not a series: each has different characters and can be read on its own.
What prizes did Angela Carter win?
The John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for The Magic Toyshop, the Somerset Maugham Award for Several Perceptions, the Cheltenham Festival Literary Prize for The Bloody Chamber, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Nights at the Circus (1984). In 2008 The Times ranked her tenth in its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
Footnotes
- Angela Carter — Wikipedia
- The Bloody Chamber — Wikipedia
- Nights at the Circus — Wikipedia
- Carter, Angela — The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
- Angela Carter, Estate of — Rogers, Coleridge & White
- The Holy Family Album — Wikipedia
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all hers.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“My intention was not to do ‘versions’ or, as the American edition of the book said, horribly, ‘adult’ fairy tales, but to extract the latent content from the traditional stories.”
— Angela Carter, on The Bloody Chamber, interviewed by John Haffenden in Novelists in Interview (1985)
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