Angela Carter’s Book of Wayward Girls and Wicked Women was first published by Virago in 1986, but I bought this newer version after Christmas with my book vouchers. A collection of subversive tales by and about women, extoling the virtues of disruptiveness, discontent, and bad manners. The collection of course is edited by Angela Carter and contains one story by her, and she wrote the introduction. In looking at the various women and girls who these stories are about Angela Carter in that introduction tells us:
“Most of the variously characterized girls and women who inhabit these stories, however, would seem much, much worse if men had created them. They would be predatory, drunken hags; confidence tricksters’ monstrously precocious children; liars and cheats; promiscuous heartbreakers. As it is, they are all presented as if they were perfectly normal. On the whole, women writers are kind to women.”
Eighteen stories by a variety of women authors, written in different styles from across the world, there are always those you like more than others, but in this collection, there was only one I really didn’t get on with. In these stories we meet debutantes, lesbians, con artists, witches, and prostitutes. Writers include Elizabeth Jolley, Grace Paley, Katherine Mansfield, Bessie Head, Colette and Jane Bowles. I can’t possibly discuss each story, but I aim to give a flavour of a few.
The collection opens with Elizabeth Jolley’s The Last Crop – about a woman in Australia who must sell her father’s farm. She doesn’t want to sell but she has to – her father had for many years longed to live in the house on the land he owned, but hadn’t been able to. A buyer is found, a kindly, honest man – who understands the sadness behind the necessity of selling. So, when the woman comes up with a plan to hold on to the farm, a while longer, the kindly buyer walks right into her trap.
In Rocky Gámez’s piece from The Gloria Stories and Jane Bowles’ A Guatemalan Idyll we encounter rich storytelling and vibrant, voracious characters. All Gloria wants to be, is a man, and she sets about becoming one, living her life as a man and finding a woman to love. Gloria insists to her lifelong friend, that now, she too will be able to father a child. In Bowles’ story an American traveller finds himself at the Pension Espinoza, surrounded by sensual, voracious women, who take great interest in him. It’s a gorgeously atmospheric story. Bessie Head takes us to Botswana and the story of Life, a woman who returns to her village after seventeen years in South Africa. While Katherine Mansfield tells us the story of a thoroughly unpleasant, spoiled young girl – who is rude and unkind to just about everyone.
One of my favourite stories was Wedlock by George Egerton, the pseudonym of Mary Chavelita Dunne. It’s set in nineteenth century London, the woman at the heart of the story a dreadfully sad drunken woman, who takes a terrible, unimaginable revenge on her husband. Nevertheless – her story is such, that even in the face of a truly terrible act, we feel some sympathy with her. Two bricklayers working in the street outside provide a kind of chorus – the one telling the other about the woman, they have just witnessed reeling down the street, and later, feeling something bad might happen, tries to keep an eye out – but is interrupted and taken away from his post.
“The little man has watched her go in, and stands in the laneway looking up at the house. A light appears in the top back window, but it must come from the stairs, it is too faint to be in the room itself. He bends his head as if to listen, but the steady fall of the rain and the drip of the roof on to some loose sheets of zinc dominate everything. He walks away a bit and watches a shadow cross the blinds; his step crunches on the loose bricks and stones; a woman rushes down the flagged path of the next house and opens the door.”
(From Wedlock by George Egerton)
In Angela Carter’s own story The Loves of Lady Purple a puppeteer – the Asiatic Professor – has created a life sized puppet called Lady Purple. The Professor has travelled the globe with his little theatre and his strange little entourage of a dumb girl and a deaf teenage boy – weaving a story of shocking exoticism around the puppet. He is the creator of everything she does and is – the stories of her escapades come from him alone.
“As he crouched above the stage directing his heroine’s movements, he recited a verbal recitative in a voice which clanged, rasped and swooped up and down in a weird duet with the stringed instrument from which the dumb girl struck peculiar intervals. But it was impossible to mistake him when the Professor spoke in the character of Lady Purple herself for then his voice modulated to a thick, lascivious murmur like fur soaked in honey which sent unwilling shudders of pleasure down the spines of the watchers.”
(From The Loves of Lady Purple by Angela Carter)
So, when Lady Purple actually comes to life – the only one to blame is her creator himself.
There’s just a little light witchery in Colette’s The Rainy Moon, set in Paris and Frances Towers’ Violet – about a servant, who sets out to control the household she is working in.
Far too many stories to write about in any detail – but overall a thoroughly satisfying collection, in which I encountered new to me writers and a few old friends.