It is far easier for a woman to lead a blameless life than it is for a man; all she has to do is to avoid sexual intercourse like the plague. What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.

She was born Angela Stalker at Eastbourne in 1940 She was born Angela Stalker at Eastbourne in 1940. Her father (who 'wore glamorous Edgar Wallace hats and smoked a pipe which he kept in the pocket of his jacket, which occasionally caught fire') was a journalist of Scots descent; her mother a cashier at Selfridges. Angela Carter recalled that she 'had a core of iron built into me by my grandmother'. An impressive matriarch 'who looked like the Giles granny', she came from a mining family in South Yorkshire and decided the family would be safer during the war in the South Yorkshire coalfields. After the war young Angela was educated at a direct-grant school in Balham and experienced a pre-television childhood in which she read omnivorously. She also ate copiously and at school, she recalled, she spent much of her time 'brooding fatly alone'. Her nickname was 'Tub'. She subsequently developed full-blown anorexia - 'long before the condition had been properly invented'.

At 18, she recalled, 'I looked like a 30-year old divorcee At 18, she recalled, 'I looked like a 30-year old divorcee. I was shy, immature, insensitive, selfish, pain-in-the-neck, way-out and terribly unhappy. I didn't even have the self-confidence to get away with being a pain-in-the-neck. In my condition then, being a reporter was a contradiction in terms'. In 1960 she married Paul Carter, an industrial chemist from Cheam who took her on 'Ban the Bomb' marches and introduced her to jazz. The next year she followed him to Bristol where she failed to land a job on the Bristol Evening Post. Instead she entered Bristol University to read for a degree in English.

The Sadeian Woman This new impetus was apparent in the baroque power of The Passion of New Eve (1977) and her entertaining, challenging essay on the Marquis de Sade, The Sadeian Woman (1979). In her ingeniously argued thesis she sought to rehabilitate him as the Enlightenment thinker who 'put pornography in the service of women'; in other words, he employed that elaborate edifice of sexual fantasy partly to demonstrate that women should be as free as men to do what takes their fancy.

The Bloody Chamber In 1979 she also published her first masterpiece, The Bloody Chamber.

Interest in classic tales Carter's interest in the farther shores of the imagination, in fantasy, and most specifically in fairytales, was lifelong. Their presence informs her novels from The Magic Toyshop (1967) to Wise Children (1991). In 1990 Carter edited The Virago Book of Fairy Tales. The Bloody Chamber (1979), a collection of re-worked re-imagined classic tales - one of which was later made into the film The Company of Wolves - shows Carter taking the opportunity to give her own particular twist of sexual unease to the vivid, cruel world of the fairy story. The result is perhaps her most flawless book, as surprising and disconcerting as the original unbowdlerised Grimm. At the same time, however, there is a strong vein of Englishness in Carter's work - an Englishness apparent in her earthy, cheerfully vulgar humour and in the distinctive flavour of her sceptical, irreverent feminism.

Angela Carter was one of the most stylish English prose writers of the age. Some found her language almost too perfect: John Mortimer, for instance, remarked that a prolonged submission to it was apt to leave the reader in a somewhat heady condition. David Holloway, the former literary editor of The Daily Telegraph, called Carter 'the Salvador Dali of English letters. Her draughtsmanship is as clear, her colours as bright and her intentions as obscure'.

Beauty and the Beast Beauty and the Beast (French: La Belle et la Bête) is a traditional fairy tale written by French novelist Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve and published in 1740 in La Jeune Américaine et les contes marins. Her lengthy version was abridged, rewritten, and published by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont in 1756 in Magasin des enfants to produce the version most commonly retold.

The Bloody Chamber