Novelist, poet and journalist Angela Carter, known for her feminist, magical realism, spent much of her life in London. Bath, however, was the backdrop for many of the key moments in her literary career, says Caleb Ferrari
While Angela Carter has typically been labelled a London-based writer, and while her time living and writing in Bristol has been given more recognition in recent years, her period in Bath has been sadly neglected. Which is a great shame given that some of her most important and most influential works were written, or at least conceived, while living in the city. The lines at the top of the page opposite are taken from her radio play, Vampirella, which Carter wrote in Bath and which was first broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 1976. This was also the “raw material”, as Carter puts it, for her story The Lady of the House of Love, which was collected in her most famous work, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979). Despite describing Bath as the “ideal place […] to relax in provincial somnolence”, her time in the city proved extremely productive both professionally and personally. Not only did she write a number of short stories, radio plays, a children’s book, a novel, and a number of journalistic pieces, but she also made several significant friendships and met her future husband and father of her child, Mark Pearce.
Carter moved to Bath in the spring of 1973, buying a small house on Hay Hill which was much in need of renovation. This was a tumultuous period in her life, having left both Bristol and her first husband at the end of the 1960s, spent a couple of years living in Japan, and then, upon returning to England, forming a rather fraught relationship with an acquaintance from her days at Bristol University. In many ways, her move to Bath was about establishing a place of her own and finding some peace. As she explained in a letter to one of her editors, the move was “occasioned by a crisis in my private life, it’s been a rather difficult spring”. Indeed, one can better appreciate her state of mind from the fact that she removed the doorbell and placed the phone out of hearing range. This was also a time of financial difficulty for Carter and so she took on an increasing amount of journalistic work, writing for the Radio Times and New Society, as well as reviewing books for programmes such as BBC Radio 4’s Now Read On and Read All About It on BBC1. While some of this work wasn’t very glamorous, her essay-writing had developed into witty and insightful analyses of contemporary culture.
Despite her somewhat hermit-like behaviour, Carter made some important friendships while in Bath and participated in the local alternative culture. Christopher Frayling was a junior lecturer recently appointed at the new University of Bath, and his intellectual passions chimed with those of Carter, including Enlightenment philosophy, the writings of de Sade, and Gothic literature. In the spring of 1974, Frayling, Carter and their mutual friend Edward Horesh went to see a film screening of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent masterpiece Nosferatu, and a line from one of the film’s intertitles made it into Carter’s Vampirella: “And when he crossed over the bridge, the phantoms came to meet him”. The radio play’s male hero character was partly inspired by Frayling, who followed in Jonathan Harker’s footsteps from Stoker’s Dracula by visiting the Carpathian Mountains, and Frayling lent Carter several books on vampires. Carter also made friends with artists Shirley Cameron and Roland Miller through the Bath Arts Workshop, participating in some of their performances. Carter even wrote one herself: performed at Walcot Village Hall, it was entitled Ceremonies and Transformations of the Beasts and centred on the figure of a man who transforms into a bird. This figure perhaps anticipates the bird-woman Fevvers, heroine of her later novel Nights at the Circus (1984), as well as the lycanthropes which appear in The Bloody Chamber stories.
Carter’s interest in the Gothic and the weird can be glimpsed in an essay which she wrote about Bath for New Society in 1975. In the opening line, she refers to “the mysterious, chthonic aperture from which the hot springs bubble out of the inner earth”, revealing the influence of H.P. Lovecraft. In this same essay, Carter also teases the city’s eclectic array of citizens, writing that Bath has “more than a fair share of occultists, neo-Platonists, yogis, theosophists, little old ladies who have spirit conversations with Red Indian squaws, religious maniacs, senile dements, natural lifers, macrobiotics, people who make perfumed candles, [and] kite-flyers”. Eccentricity, Carter suggests, comes with the territory, as “Bath’s omphaloid location induces introspection, meditation, inwardness, [and] massive sloth”. However, not everyone was so enamoured with the place: the “Anglo-Saxons wouldn’t live here”, Carter observes, because “they thought it was haunted”. Nevertheless, it was in a moment of introspection and inwardness that Carter first struck upon the central figure of Vampirella one day at home on Hay Hill. As she tells us, running a pencil “idly along the top of the radiator” to produce a “metallic, almost musical rattle” conjured up the image of a lady vampire with “long, sharp fingernails (all the better to eviscerate you with!)” running her fingernail along the bars of a gilded birdcage. From here, she imagined that “the bird in that gilded cage might be […] an image of the lady herself, caged as she was by her hereditary appetites that she found both compulsive and loathsome.”
While Carter’s image as a writer has been traditionally linked to London, it is important that we acknowledge the significant influence that living in Bath had upon her life and career, from the writing of some of her most distinctive pieces of literary fiction to her first encounter with Mark, whom, incidentally, Carter described as looking “like a werewolf”. However, by 1977 Carter found herself frustrated by Bath and its alternative society, which she felt had become so dominant that it excluded all else; as she told a friend at the time, the “mixture has too few ingredients”. Despite her departure from Bath, Carter would repeatedly return to the city, drawn, as she memorably put it, by its “theatrical splendour [and] the ethereal two-dimensionality of a town of dream.”
Caleb Ferrari is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of the West of England and co-founder of the Angela Carter Society: angelacartersociety.com