Writers as diverse as Anthony Burgess and John Hawkes have expressed great admiration for her work; some reviewers, unimpressed, have greeted it with incomprehension or vague revulsion. And for many readers "Gothic" is only acceptable when it stays boxed in its corner, or imparts a slight shading to a narrative, not when it demands direct and sustained attention. However, both her writing and its reception changed between the 1960s, when she won two major literary prizes, and the 1970s, when she became more notably, and more problematically, a literary outsider.
Angela Carter grew up in South London. In view of her later interest in conditions of rootlessness, it is perhaps worth noting that her family was new to the city (her journalist father, Hugh Stalker, came from Scotland; her mother, Olive Stalker, from a mining district in Yorkshire) and to the middle class. Following recent family tradition, she passed the "11-plus" qualifying examination, and attended a local (direct grant) grammar school, before beginning a brief apprentice career in journalism. In 1960 she married, and in 1962 she went back to school, to Bristol University, where she read English and specialized in medieval literature; however--perhaps because she was four years older than most undergraduates, perhaps because of her background--she seems to have practiced something of an autodidact's resistance to the English curriculum.
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