Japan (1969–72) had been her rite of passage in between: ‘In 1969, I was given some money to run away with, and did so. The money was the Somerset Maugham Travel Award and five hundred pounds went further in those days; it took me as far as Japan… .’ (NS 28). This was the place where she lost and found herself. Being young was traumatic; she had been anorexic, her tall, big-boned body and her intransigent spirit had been at odds with the ways women were expected to be, inside or outside. Looking back to her teenage years, she always made the same joke: ‘I now [1983] recall this period with intense embarrassment, because my parents’ concern to protect me from predatory boys was only equalled by the enthusiasm with which the boys I did indeed occasionally meet protected themselves against me’ (F. 23). Years later, when she became a great admirer of the brilliant and long-neglected Australian writer Christina Stead, she was to recognize a kindred spirit, another love-adventuress baffled by male inhibitions. (In Hazel Rowley's biography we learn that Stead long remembered the way she would call out to the boys, as a little girl, ‘the boys who did not answer’.) Angela Carter portrayed her own first marriage as a more or less desperate measure, with her making the running (‘somebody who would go to Godard movies with me and on CND marches and even have sexual intercourse with me, though he insisted we should be engaged first’ (F. 23)). And in her five 1960s novels the point of view is interestingly vagrant – as readily ‘male’ as ‘female’, as we have seen.