May 7, 1940

We look at the formative years of Angela Carter (May 7, 1940 16 February 16, 1992), in this paragraph from her Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article:

Carter [née Stalker], Angela Olive .... writer, was born on 7 May 1940 at 12 Hyde Gardens, Eastbourne, Sussex, the second child and only daughter of Hugh Alexander Stalker, a journalist, and (Sophia) Olive, née Farthing, who had been a cashier at Selfridge's store in Oxford Street. She spent much of her childhood in Yorkshire, near Rotherham, where she went to stay with her maternal grandmother to escape wartime bombing. She always remembered these years with affection. One uncle was a miner and she retained a sympathy with working people all her life. She said that, as a child, she grew up thinking that all sheep were black, so dense was the industrial pollution. Her grandmother's house contained three copies of Foxe's Book of Martyrs. Its horrific accounts of martyrdoms, and the even more horrific illustrations, may have influenced her fiction, through which violence ran like a thread.


Here are some covers, with Carter's name on them, and these influences may be apparent:

Cats,  of course.