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VINTAGE CLASSICS

ANGELA CARTER

Angela Carter was born in 1940 and read English at Bristol University, before spending two years living in Japan. She lived and worked extensively in the United States and Australia. Her first novel, Shadow Dance, was published in 1965, followed by the Magic Toyshop in 1967, which went on to win the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. She wrote a further four novels, together with three collections of short stories, two works of non-fiction and a volume of collected writings. Carter died in 1992.

ANGELA CARTER

Sh ORT S TOR i ES

Fireworks

Black Venus

American Ghosts and Old World Wonders

Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (editor)

The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales (editor)

Wayward Girls and Wicked Women (editor)

N O v ELS

Shadow Dance

The Magic Toyshop

Several Perceptions

Heroes and Villains

Nights at the Circus

The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

The Passion of New Eve

Wise Children N ON -fi CT i ON

The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History

Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings

Expletives Deleted

Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings

D RA m A

Come Unto These Yellow Sands: Four Radio Plays

The Curious Room: Collected Dramatic Works

ANGELA CARTER LOVE

wi T h A p RE f ACE BY Audrey Niffenegger

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The moral right of the author has been asserted

First published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis in 1971

Revised edition first published by Chatto & Windus in 1987

This paperback first published in Vintage Classics in 2025

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i SBN 9780099594215

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Preface

WHEN THE MONOTONES posed the musical question ‘(Who Wrote) The Book of Love?’ in 1958 they did not have Angela Carter in mind; her third novel, Love, came out in 1971. Buteven if they had been able to look into thefuture they probably would not have chosen her to be Love’s author. Carter’s vision of love is bohemian and bleak and fundamentally incompatible with doo-wop. Her Love leaves out all the gentle beguiling aspects of the thing in favor of a love that is guilty, mad, perverse, sort of incestuous, and dangerous to those who stray within reach of its claws.

This won’t surprise you if you’ve read any of Angela Carter’s other books. The Bloody Chamber is just that, and to be a character in an Angela Carter story is to suffer the attentions of rapaciousemotion. In Love the sufferings are triangular, the protagonists awkward, instinctual and artistic in the way that Venus flytraps might be artistic if they were human.

Love is a brilliant and often overlooked novel; it is overshadowed by Carte r’s even mo re brillian t l ater work. Although everything that happens in Love is possible in the real world, it has thefeeling of theimpossible which permeates her other novels, and theintensities of observation and invention which are her trademarks.

I started reading Angela Carter’s work around the same time I discovered the writing of Margaret Atwood and A.S. Byatt, two writers of her generation whose prose is also richly allusive and packed with willful characters who struggle with the expectations of society. Often these characters give up the effort of attempting to fit in – which was never too sincere to begin with – and are transformed into their true selves; difficult and different and full of surprises. Carter’s work teems with such vii

people, and Annabel, Love’s anti-heroine, is one of her best. She is cryptic, sly, emotionally deranged and yet fatally attractive. Annabel, her husband Lee, and Lee’s brother Buzz perform a minuet of betrayal, jealousy, and self-destruction. In the book’s opening scene we meet Annabel cowering under a sky in which the sun and the moon are simultaneously visible, and this theme is repeated in the couplings of all the characters: things that shouldn’t be together, are. Love is a chronicle of attraction and repulsion within this tiny world of three people.

In 1987 Carter added a wry afterword which extends and comments on the lives of the characters; without this the book is extraordinarily gothic and dark. All that she does in her later work with the aid of the supernatural and special effects she accomplishes in Love by simply dwelling in the odd minds of Annabel, Lee and Buzz, by letting their mutual incomprehension take its toll.

Angela Carter died of cancer in 1992. In his obituary for her in the New York Times, Salman Rushdie wrote that she was ‘a thumber of noses,adefiler of sacred cows. She loved nothing so much as cussed – but also blithe – nonconformity. Her books unshackle us, toppling the statues of the pompous, demolishing the temples and commissariats of righteousness. They draw their strength, their vitality, from all that is unrighteous, illegitimate, low. They are without equal, and without rival.’ Her work is like a dream house in which every room lets onto every other room; it doesn’t matter where you enter,you will eventually findyourself exploring every nook and cranny. Whether you are holding one of her books in your hands for the first time or are a long-time devotee, when you turn this page you are entering the complete and boundless world of Angela Carter.

Audrey Niffenegger, 2006

vi viii

O NE DAY , A NNABE L saw the sun and moon in the sky at the same time. The sight filled her with a terror which entirely consumed her and did not leave her until the night closed in catastrophe for she had no instinct for self-preservation if she was confronted by ambiguities.

It had happened as she walked home through the park. In the system of correspondences by which she interpreted the world around her, this park had a special significance and she walked along its overgrown paths with nervous pleasure, especially in certain yellow, tarnished lights of winter when the trees were bare and the sun, as it set, rimmed thebranches with cold fire. An eighteenth-century landscape gardener planned the park to surround a mansion which had been pulled down long ago and now the once harmonious artificial wilderness, randomly dishevelled by time, spread its green tangles across the high shoulder of a hill only a stone’s throw from a busy road that ran through the city dockland. All that remained of the former mansion were a few architectural accessories now the property of the city museum. There was a stable built on the lines of a miniature Parthenon, housing forHouyhnhnms rather than natural horses; thepillared portico, especially effective under thelight of afull moon,never to be entered again by any horse, functioned onlyasa pure piece of design, afocal point in the green composition on the south side of the hill where Annabel rarely ventured for serenity bored her and the Mediterranean aspect of this part of the park held no excitements for her. She preferred the Gothic north, where an ivy-covered tower with leaded ogive windows skulked among the trees. Both these pre tty whims ies were kept

securely locked forfear of thedespoliation of vandals but their presence still performed its original role, transforming the park into a premeditated theatre where the romantic imagination could act out any performance it chose amongst settings of classic harmony or crabbed quaintness. And the magic strangeness of thepark was enhanced by itscurious silence. Footfalls fell softly on thelong grass and few birds sang there, but the presence all around of the sprawling, turbulent city,however muffled its noises, lent such haunted, breathless quiet an unnatural quality.

The park mai ntained onl y a single, still impressive entrance, a massive pair of wrought-iron gates decorated with cherubs, masks of beasts, stylized reptiles and spearheads from which the gilding flaked, but these gates were never either open or closed. They hung always a little ajar and drooped from their hinges with age; they served a function no longer for all the railings round the park were gone long ago and access everywhere was free and easy. The park was on such high ground it seemed to hang in the air above a vast, misty model of acity andthosewho walked through it always felt excessively exposed to the weather. At times, all seemed nothing but a playground for the winds and, at others, an immense drain forall therain theheavens could pour forth.

Annabel went through the park in a season of high winds and lurid weather, early one winter’s evening, and happened to look up at the sky.

On her right, she saw the sun shining down on the district of terraces and crescents where she lived while, on her left, above thespires and skyscrapers of thecity itself, therising moon hung motionlessinarift of absolute night. Though one was setting while theother rose, both sun and moon gave forth an equal brilliance so theheavens contained two contrary states at once. Annabel gazed upwards, appalled to seesuch adreadful rebellion of the familiar. There was nothing in her mythology to help her resolve this conflict and, all at once, she felt herself thehelpless pivot of theentire universe as if sun, moon, stars and all the hosts of the sky span round upon herself, their volitionless axle.

At that, she bolted from thepaththrough thelong grass, seeking cover from the sky. Wholly at the mercy of the elements, she lurched and zig-zagged and her movements were so erratic, apparently at the whim of the roaring winds, and her colours so ill-defined, blurred by the approaching dusk, that she mightherself have been no more than an emanation of the place or time of year.

At the crest of the hill, she flung up her hands in a furious gesture of surrender and pitched herself sideways off the path, concealing herself behind a clump of gorse where she lay moaning and breathless for a few moments. The wind tied strands of her hair to spikes of gorse and thus confirmed her intuition that she should not budge one inch until the dreadful, ambiguous hour resolved itself entirely to night. So there she stayed, a mad girl plastered in fear and trembling against a thorn bush suffering an anguish which also visited her when pressed just as close to the blond fleshofthe young husband who slept beside her and did not know her dreams, although he was a beautiful boy whom anybody else would have thought well worth the effort of loving.

She suffered from nightmares too terrible to reveal to him, especially since he himself was often the principal actor in th em and appeared in ma ny hideous dream disguises. Sometimes, during the day, she stopped, startled, before some familiar object because it seemed to have just changed its form back to the one she remembered after a brief, private period impersonating something quite strange, for she had thecapacity forchanging theappearance of thereal world which is the price paid by those who take too subjective a view of it. All she apprehended through her senses she took only as objects forinterpretation in theexpressionist style and she saw, in everyday things, a world of mythic, fearful shapes of whose existence she was convinced although she never spoke of it to anyone; nor had she ever suspected that everyday,sensuous human practice might shape the real world. When she did discover that such athing was possible, it proved the beginning of the end for her for how could she possess any notion of the ordinary?

Her brother-in-law once gave her a set of pornographic photographs. She accepted thegift absently, without doing him the courtesy of investigating the complex motives behind it, and she examined the pictures one by one with a certain impersonal curiosity. A glum, painted young woman, the principal actress (torso and legs sheathed in black leather, sex exposed) eyed the camera indifferently as though it were no business of hers she was blocked at every orifice; she went about her obscene business with neither relishnor disgust, rather with theabstract precision of thegeometrician so that these stark juxtapositions of genitalia, the antithesis of the erotic, were cold as Russia when nights are coldest thereand possessed chiefly thepower to affront. Annabel, comforted and reassured by these indifferent arrangements of bizarre intersecting lines, became convinced they told atrue story. For herself, all she wanted in life was a bland, white, motionless face like that of the photographic whore so she could live a quiet life behind it, because she was so often terrified when the pictures around her began to move, as she thought, of their own accord and she could not control them.

So thesephotographs were cards in her private tarot pack and signified love.

As she waited for the sun to set, she had ample time to refresh and embellish her initial terror and was finally seized with the conviction that this night, of all nights, it would never disappear at all but lie stranded for ever above the horizon so she would have to stay nailed to the hillside. At these times, she thought of her husband as a place of safety although, when she was face to face with him, she could find no means of telling him her fears since his brother was her only intermediary between her private experience and the common one; and, this time, it was he who rescued her so she learned to trust him a little more.

But when she first met the boy who became her brotherin-law, he frightened her more than anything had done until that date.

Before they were married, when she was living with Lee, who was then astudent, Lee came home from alecture one February afternoon to findhis brotherhad returned from