Daring young woman
Review of Nights at the Circus
by Angela Carter
Robert Nye
Thursday 27 September 1984 16.54 BST
Angela Carter goes from strength to strength. She has made something of a speciality of novels and stories in which rusty Gothic weapons are repolished and then employed to open up some pretty modern wounds, finding new and intelligent uses for fantasy. The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman (1972), The Passion of New Eve (1977), and the shorter fairy - tale fictions collected in The Bloody Chamber (1979) were all interesting, amusing, irritating, and impressive in about equal degrees.