Biography Angela Carter
Angela Olive Stalker was born in Eastbourne, Sussex, England on the 8th May 1940. War had broken out in Europe and she was evacuated as a child to Yorkshire to live with her maternal grandmother, a working-class, matriarchal, domineering, feminist bread-\'n-buta granny of the north of England.
Carter left school and started work at the age of nineteen for the Croydon Advertiser, following in the footsteps of her father - who was a Scottish journalist working in London. One year later she met and married Paul Carter. She was to divorce him almost twelve years after, in 1972.
She studied English at the University of Bristol and built on her already vast cultural and literary baggage. Her mother was a great literary influence on her, as she devoured book after book and author after author. Her upbringing was very much based on the works of Shakespeare and great names of English literature. The influence of authors on her work is enormous and perhaps incalculable. There are references to Chaucer, Shakespeare, Lawrence, Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, Mansfield, Woolf, Dickens, Keats, Stoker, Carroll and on and on the list will go...she was not just confined to English literature either.
In 1977, Carter married Mark Pearce and they settled down in Balham in south London. She worked on and off over the next decade as part-time lecturer and resident writer at Brown University, Rhode Island, the University of Adelaide, South Australia and finally at the University of East Anglia, Norwich.
Angela Carter died on the 16th of February 1992 at the age of 51 from cancer.
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