Angela Carter

Angela Carter is my earliest and most enduring research crush, and Bristol is central to both her story and mine. She lived in the city for nearly a decade during the 1960s — a formative period in which she wrote five of her nine novels, three of them set wholly or partly in Bristol. It was here that Carter honed her radical approach to storytelling, politics, and performance, developing a voice that moved restlessly across myth, realism, satire, and fantasy.

'Anything that Flickers'

My long‑standing engagement with Carter began with my PhD (University of Manchester, 1998), which explored her writing for radio, film, and television, and was later published as Anagrams of Desire (Manchester University Press, 2003). From the outset, I was drawn to Carter’s acute awareness of performance, identity, and power, and her fascination with how stories are shaped by the media that carry them.

In many ways, my love of cinema — and my ongoing fascination with stardom, self‑invention, and performance — stems directly from my engagement with Carter’s work. Her writing sharpened my attention to the screen as a site where identities are continually made, unmade, and reimagined: preoccupations that continue to underpin my research across adaptation, film practice, and cinema heritage.

“I was struck by the quite unhealthy sense of power with which you feel you’re actually beaming figments of your imagination across the city, across the country, across the world.”

— Angela Carter

Screen, Japan, and Adaptation

My early research focused in particular on Carter’s two film adaptations — The Company of Wolves and The Magic Toyshop — and on her Japanese writings, exploring the transformative impact that Japan had on her life, politics, and imagination. I’m especially interested in Carter as a cultural translator: a writer who used Japan as a critical mirror through which to rethink gender, sexuality, race, authorship, and the constructedness of identity.

This work addresses both the creative generativity of that encounter and its ethical complexities, including the risks of simplification and orientalism. It now brings together Carter, film, and Japan through practice‑based research, treating adaptation not simply as a textual process but as a creative and critical methodology. This approach is developed in my article 'Through the “Magic Mirror”: Adapting Angela Carter’s Japanese Writings for the Silver Screen', which reflects on the development of a feature‑length screenplay adaptation of Carter’s Japanese work in collaboration with screenwriter Scott Bassett, supported by BFI Develoment funding and the challenges of translating her writing for contemporary screen contexts. I am also co-editor of a special issue of Contemporary Women’s Writing dedicated to Angela Carter and Japan, with Natsumi Ikoma.

Radio, Place, and Public Memory

Another enduring strand of my work explores Angela Carter’s relationship with radio. This includes the BBC Radio 4 programme Writing in Three Dimensions: Angela Carter’s Love Affair with Radio (Home, February 2012), which examined Carter’s distinctive use of voice, sound, and performance across her radio writing, criticism, and broadcasts, and her understanding of radio as both a creative and political medium.

I’ve also written on Carter’s iconoclasm and place‑making, examining how her legacy is remembered, contested, and materially embedded in the spaces she inhabited. Co‑authored with Marie Mulvey‑Roberts, '“Nothing Sacred”: Angela Carter’s Iconoclasm, Place‑Making and Memorialization' explores how Carter’s work and reputation are shaped through acts of cultural memory, public commemoration, and local engagement — particularly in Bristol. I’m co‑editor of Pyrotechnics: Angela Carter’s Incandescent Imagination, a major collection of 21st‑century criticism on Carter, with Marie Mulvey-Roberts.

Alongside this scholarly work, I’m deeply involved in public‑facing, place‑based projects celebrating Carter’s Bristol connections, including the Get Angela Carter website, and as a co‑founder of the Angela Carter Society. Bristol remains vital to this work, not simply as a biographical footnote, but as a creative context that shaped Carter’s imagination and continues to inform my own practice‑based research, public engagement, and place‑making projects. I’m particularly interested in Carter as a writer who moved fluidly across media and cultures, constantly reworking stories through adaptation, voice, and performance.

Contemporary Practice and Collaboration

I’m currently developing a documentary project exploring Angela Carter’s involvement in the 1960s folk music revival, alongside her husband Paul Carter, during their years in Bristol. The film will be featured on the British Library website, alongside the Angela and Paul Carter archives, and is being developed in collaboration with artist Chris Molan and Emeritus Professor Marie Mulvey-Roberts. Molan was a contemporary of the Carters in 1960s Bristol and, following Paul Carter’s death, was donated the archive — an encounter that inspired a new body of artworks responding to their shared experiences. Still actively involved in Bristol’s folk music scene today, this project brings together archival research, lived memory, and contemporary creative practice, allowing the project to explore Carter’s cultural networks beyond the literary canon.

In addition, I'm developing an immersive theatre project 'When Cary Met Angie' which brings my two research crushes together in an imagined encounter between Cary Grant and Angela Carter in the Greyhound Pub in Clifton.

Selected Publications

Crofts, Charlotte. ‘“Curiously Downbeat Hybrid” or “Radical Retelling?” Neil Jordan’s and Angela Carter’s The Company of Wolves.’ In Sisterhoods: Across the Literature/Media Divide, edited by Deborah Cartmell, I. Q. Hunter, Heidi Kaye, and Imelda Whelehan, 48–63. London: Pluto Press, 1998.

Crofts, Charlotte. Anagrams of Desire: Angela Carter’s Writing for Radio, Film and Television. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.

Crofts, Charlotte. ‘The Other of the Other: Angela Carter’s “New‑Fangled” Orientalism.’ In Re‑Visiting Angela Carter: Texts, Contexts, Intertexts, edited by Rebecca Munford, pp. 87–109. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 

Crofts, Charlotte. ‘Through the “Magic Mirror”: Adapting Angela Carter’s Japanese Writings for the Silver Screen.’ Contemporary Women’s Writing 16, no. 2 (2022): 263–282. Open Access. https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpad001  

Crofts, Charlotte, and Natsumi Ikoma. ‘Introduction: Angela Carter and Japan—A Global Perspective.’ Contemporary Women’s Writing 16, no. 2 (2022): 127–134. https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpac027  

Crofts, Charlotte, and Marie Mulvey‑Roberts, eds. Angela Carter’s Pyrotechnics: A Union of Contraries. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.

Crofts, Charlotte, and Marie Mulvey‑Roberts. ‘“Nothing Sacred”: Angela Carter’s Iconoclasm, Place‑Making and Memorialization.’ In Angela Carter’s Futures: Representations, Adaptations and Legacies, edited by Sarah Gamble and Anna Watz. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024.