The peeves have some issues with this
Okay, I will cop to never having really got on with the works of Angela Carter.
Partly, perhaps, because she got a load of literary cred while authors I much preferred who were also working in the gothic fantastical mode - Tanith Lee, Jane Gaskell - were just not on litcrit radar.
And as for this: At a time when English literature was dominated by sober social realists, she played with disreputable genres - gothic horror, science fiction, fairytale - and gave free rein to the fantastic and the surreal.
- which, do admit, is pretty dismissive of those 'disreputable genres' -
I don't even believe in the case that in the 60s and 70s EngLit was all about the drear social realism.
Hello, Carter was writing pretty much contemporaneously with Doris Lessing going into inner and outer space. Though perhaps Lessing wouldn't really earn the accolade of 'playful'?
Wot abaht Simon Raven, who had gothicism and weird science and secret histories?
This is that thing yet again where somebody gets bigged up as being UNIQUE: There Can Be Only One, by overlooking anything that might contradict that picture.
***
And, in other news, adultery in Hampstead!!!! I happened to notice in the local indie bookshop today, Hampstead Fever by Carol Cooper, which - I was not particularly tempted to purchase it - looks as though it may not be the sensitive, wistful evocation of adulterous passion that is usually signified by the 'adultery in Hampstead novel' tag. More like the Hampstead bonkbuster? The intertwined lives and loves of six North Londoners get complicated as emotions rise one hot summer. They’re all approaching 40, but they don’t act it. The mother panics about her child, the journalist struggles to pay her bills, the new chef cooks up trouble, and even the sensible doctor loses his head when the mercury soars.
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