During the inventive last ten years of her life—when she produced two of the most festive and disturbing novels of the last years of the century, Nights at the Circus (1984) and Wise Children (1991)—Angela Carter also reinvented herself. She took on the time-honored role of tale-spinner and storyteller, becoming her era's Mother Goose. In a foreword to Come Unto These Yellow Sands (1985) about the appeal of writing for radio, she described with relish “the atavistic lure, the atavistic power, of voices in the dark . . . the writer who gives the words to those voices retains some of the authority of the most antique tellers of tales.” The shocked obituary tributes that followed her death at age fifty-one all registered her paradoxical authority, which seemed to originate in subliterary or preliterary life. Fellow novelist Margaret Atwood cast Carter in a fairy-tale part:

The amazing thing about her, for me...