Angela Carter's American Postcards

Angela Carter’s second novel, The Magic Toyshop (1967) opens with a quote from Donne’s Elegy 20, “O my America, my new found land.” Twisting Donne’s metaphor in a manner that became a signature with her, Carter turns Donne’s virile eroticism into a figure for a pubescent girl’s auto-erotic discovery; the novel’s young protagonist is “a physiological Cortez.” Yet Carter’s America -- both of its continents -- was only ever “new found” in this borrowed metaphor. Carter’s own writing conjures an America that is ancient, populous and strange. Her mark on British literary culture is indelible: not the least, the prize formerly known as the Orange, now the Women’s Prize for Fiction, was created in part because of the sexist slight of her career-long omission from Booker shortlists. Yet besides a brief, posthumous flurry of interest in her writing, Carter’s American reputation has been comparatively small. She’s cultish; readers discover her as Jeanette Winterson’s predecessor or encounter her revisions of fairy tales in college courses. Recently in the New York Times, Dwight Garner wondered if her Britishness had made her “too tangy and exotic to make much of an impression on American audiences.”