Angela Carter

Carter was born in England during WWII, and she was evacuated from her home as a child to live with her grandmother in Yorkshire. She struggled with anorexia throughout her teenage years. After high school Carter began working as a journalist, and then studied English literature at the University of Bristol. She won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1969 and used the proceeds to leave her husband (Paul Carter) and move to Tokyo. There she developed her more radical feminist ideas and gathered material for her books. She wrote many novels, short story collections, and essays during her career, but is best known for The Bloody Chamber and her essay The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography. In 1977 Carter married Mark Pearce and they had one son together. She died of lung cancer at age fifty-one, and is still considered one of the most influential British novelists of the century.