The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, a collection of short stories written in the 1970s by the British author Angela Carter, became the subject of an extensive body of literary criticism in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It is the best-known work of an author credited with influencing modern-day writers such as Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson, David Mitchell, Neil Gaiman, and Zadie Smith. Literary critic Richard Raynor describes her as "cracking open the middle-class conventions that had dominated the British novel" and "play[ing] fairy godmother to younger generations of talent."
Carter was thirty-nine when The...