Wise Children Study Guide

Angela Carter, born at the outbreak of World War II, spent much of her early childhood hiding out in northern England, part of her parents’ effort to keep her safe from Germany’s pervasive aerial bombings. Starting in adolescence, Carter rebelled against her protective, socially conservative parents, getting a job in the male-dominated field of journalism. In the midst of a troubled marriage, Carter found solace in writing fiction, completing her first six novels in seven years and winning the prestigious Somerset Maugham award. In 1969, Carter left her husband and fled to Japan, where she wrote some of her most famous work, including The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman (1972) and the short story collection Fireworks (1974). By the time Carter returned to London, her magical realist style had earned her a reputation as “the fairy queen” of English literature, an image bolstered by her 1979 anthology The Bloody Chamber, which retold classic fairytales through a feminist lens. After giving birth to a son in 1983, Carter continued to write and teach, becoming one of the most celebrated authors in contemporary British fiction. Tragically, Carter died of lung cancer when she was only 51 years old. Wise Children, her last novel, was published less than a year before her death.

Wise Children begins in the 1920s, when American vaudeville—and its counterpart in Britain, pantomime—were reaching their zeniths. Less than a decade later, the advent of moviemaking would change the entertainment world. Then, after WWII, television would become the medium of the day. The Hazard family’s trajectory mimics this changing entertainment landscape: the previous generation’s fixation on Shakespeare gives way to pantomime shows, then to Hollywood movies, and finally to gameshows and product placement. On a darker note, though Dora tries to avoid the topic, the novel is haunted by the violence of World War II, and particularly by Blitzkrieg (or “the Blitz,” Germany’s bombing campaign on London). The Blitz, which lasted from September of 1940 to May of 1941, destroyed large swathes of the city and killed more than 40,000 British citizens. In the novel, Dora’s beloved Grandma is killed by a bomb. Wise Children also reflects the hardship Great Britain faced after the war, when food shortages forced rationing and frequent labor strikes. 

The picaresque plot twists of Wise Children take clear inspiration from the fairytales of Charles Perrault. Indeed, classic stories like Sleeping Beauty and Little Red Riding Hood influenced much of Carter’s work. But the most important allusions in the novel are all to Shakespeare. The farces of mistaken identity between Nora and Dora recall plays like Twelfth Night and A Comedy of Errors, and an entire section of the novel is devoted to Melchior’s gaudy film adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And though Dora frequently insists that Wise Children is a “comedy,” the narrative is haunted by frequent references (and parallels) to Shakespeare’s King Lear, in which the titular king mistakenly favors his conniving daughters over his youngest and most loyal child, Cordelia.