The grace, shimmer and seductive innuendoes of Cocteau’s vision suffuse two of Carter’s tales, “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” and “The Tiger’s Bride”, yet with a difference, because Carter wants us to feel what it is like to be Beauty from the inside.

But Angela also loved the theme of Beauty meeting Beast, and Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la bête (1946) remained one of her favourite films. The fairy tale of “La Belle et la bête” (Beauty and the Beast), first composed by Mme de Villeneuve and later reshaped by Mme Leprince de Beaumont, was roundly condemned by Carter: Beaumont was a French governess working in England, and she was bent only on “house-training the id”. Reclaiming abuse was another (Carmen Callil, Angela Carter’s close friend and, later, publisher, named her publishing house Virago, where neglected women’s fiction was brought out again in America, there was another, called Shameless Hussy Press).Ĭarter’s version of “Puss-in-Boots” also takes off from Perrault, spliced and spiced with opera and pantomime and commedia dell’arte motifs to create a far more exuberant, amorous and freewheeling tale than its source. “The Company of Wolves” first appeared in Bananas, the literary magazine that the novelist Emma Tennant began and edited from 1975 to 1979, where several reworkings of myths and fairy tales by other writers – Sara Maitland, Michelene Wandor and Tennant herself – also appeared The methods of attacking the genre’s deathly conformity were multiple: inverting them was one strategy, and Angela Carter does so, again and again – especially in the enthralling close of “The Tiger’s Bride”. Curiosity about possible sexualities was a central theme, reflected in the cult status of Jean-Luc Godard’s films of that time. Irreverence and anarchy, scepticism and non-conformity were qualities Carter shared with fellow Londoners in the reverberating force field around the Beatles, the Stones, satirists like Lenny Bruce and the founders of Oz magazine.

Yet these stories provided a powerful catalyst.

The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter