The house in Clapham, south London, where the acclaimed author Angela Carter lived for the last 16 years of her life has been commemorated with a blue plaque by English Heritage.
Carter lived at 107, The Chase from 1976 until her death from lung cancer in 1992, aged 51. There, she wrote seminal works including The Bloody Chamber, her acclaimed erotic retellings of fairytales, Nights at the Circus and Wise Children, also tutoring her then student, now Nobel laureate, Kazuo Ishiguro at her kitchen table, and entertaining writers including Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and JG Ballard.
“Downstairs was carnival: true, there was a serious kitchen, but there were also violet and marigold walls, and scarlet paintwork,” wrote Susannah Clapp of Carter’s Clapham home. “A kite hung from the ceiling of the sitting room, the shelves supported menageries of wooden animals, books were piled on chairs. Birds – one of them looking like a ginger wig and called Carrot Top – were released from their cages to whirl through the air, balefully watched through the window by the household’s salivating cats. ‘Free range,’ said Angela.”
Rushdie said that Carter “was incredibly kind and generous to young writers”, including him. “She was also one of the true originals of English literature, both fabulist and feminist, and her richness of language was and remains a treasure,” he added.
Lorna Sage, in an obituary of Carter for the Guardian, said the author had died at the height of her powers. “The boldness of her writing, her powers of enchantment and hilarity, her generous inventiveness, all make this premature and tragic death harder to take. We needed her around,” wrote Sage. “She will never have the chance herself to shock us at 70, but the books will retain their power to do it.”
Carter, whose politics were as revolutionary as her writing, wrote to Sage in 1977 that “the notion that one day the red dawn will indeed break over Clapham is the one thing that keeps me going”. She added: “I have my own private lists prepared for after the purges but … I’m more interested in socialist reconstruction after the revolution than the revolution itself.”
English Heritage has been on a quest to address the paucity of women honoured by its London blue plaque scheme, with the Knightsbridge home of war correspondent and writer Martha Gellhorn also marked this month. Last year, English Heritage revealed that just 14% of blue plaques celebrated women, with curatorial director Anna Eavis saying that the dominance of plaques to men reflected a blindness “to both the role women have played in our society and the type of roles deemed worthy of celebration”.
