When Angela Carter died in 1992, at the age of 51, the obituaries nearly all agreed on one thing – that shewas a spell-binder. This is Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood:

Her friend and publisher Carmen Callil (Virago, Chatto) paid her the same kind of tribute: ‘She had flotillas of friends…. Once you were in you were part of an enchanted circle…. She was the oracle we all consulted, a listener whose eloquent silences kept us hanging on every word she quietly and wickedly uttered.’ This picture of her as a witch or wise woman derives not only from her personality in private life, but from the role she evolved for herself as a writer, on the page, and even more as a performer of her own work in readings, when she could reconnect herself with the oral tradition of story-telling.

In fact you cannot, in the end, separate the woman and the writer. One of Angela Carter's most impressive and humorous achievements was that she evolved this part to play. How to Be the Woman Writer. Not that she was wearing a mask, exactly; it was more a matter of refusing to observe any decorous distinction between art and life, so that she was inventive in reality as well as in creating plots and characters for the books. She belongs among the fabulists and tale-spinners, the mockers and speculators and iconoclasts and utopians. ‘She was born subversive,’ Margaret Atwood wrote: ‘She had an instinctive feeling for the other side, which included also the underside.’

She was born in 1940, and grew up in south London in the postwar period of free orange juice and cod-liver oil, the National Health Service, and grammar-school education, when children's sweets were rationed and their mothers were encouraged to go back home and be housewives.