Angela Olive Carter: The Magic Toyshop

Angela Carter’s second novel, The Magic Toyshop, was first published in 1967, and brought her widely acclaimed readership as a major British author when it won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1968. In 1988 it was turned into a film, (produced by Steve Morrison and directed by David Wheatley), with Carter writing the screenplay. It has been considered over the years by critics as the novel about a young girl’s rite of passage, a family novel, and a patriarchal nuclear representation of the family set in a landscape of fairy tale and myth, unquestionable filial obedience and societal gender stereotyping.

In this third-person narrative, we witness Carter’s new reading of fairy tale and mythologica