Recommended Reading:

Please don't miss "Chamber of Secrets: The Sorcery of Angela Carter" by fairy tale scholar Marina Warner, which is over on the Paris Review site.

Warner writes: "Angela Carter...refused
to join in rejecting or denouncing fairy tales, but instead embraced the
whole stigmatized genre, its stock characters and well-known plots, and
with wonderful verve and invention, perverse grace and wicked fun,
soaked them in a new fiery liquor that brought them leaping back to life.
From her childhood, through her English degree at the University of
Bristol where she specialised in Medieval Literature, and her
experiences as a young woman on the folk-music circuit in the West
Country, Angela Carter was steeped in English and Celtic faerie, in
romances of chivalry and the grail, Chaucerian storytelling and
Spenserian allegory, and she was to become fairy tale’s rescuer, the
form’s own knight errant, who seized hold of it in its moribund state
and plunged it into the fontaine de jouvence itself."

So very true. In the mythic arts field we owe an enormous debt to Angela Carter, whose influence on contemporary fairy tale literature remains unsurpassed to this day.

Art above: "Little Red Riding Hood" by Gustave Doré (1832-1883)