The Lit Hub girls are fighting!
Here’s a fun fact to celebrate Angela Carter’s birthday: the beloved feminist icon did not care for literary tote saint Joan Didion.
Need some proof? In 1986, Angela Carter sat down for a phone interview with Rosemary Carroll for BOMB. During the course of the interview, Carroll mentioned that she appreciated the “unique sense of real love for, and protectiveness towards, other women” in Carter’s work, adding: “It is something that I look for in women writers and almost never find.” Carter thanked her, and asked her what she meant. Here’s the resulting exchange:
RC
Women writers frequently adopt a tone or an attitude toward their female characters which is somewhat negative and ungenerous. It comes across as either whining self-indulgence or congratulatory, stolid self-reliance. There is so little compassion.
