The Bloody Chamber
Angela Carter's 1979 collection rewrites ten classic fairy tales, Bluebeard, Beauty and the Beast, Puss in Boots, Little Red Riding Hood, and others, into adult fictions preoccupied with the erotics of power. In the title novella, a young pianist marries a wealthy French Marquis, is left alone with his keys in his Breton château, and discovers what he has done with his previous wives. In The Tiger's Bride, a Beauty refuses the offered transformation and chooses her own. In The Company of Wolves, Little Red meets a werewolf in the woods and does not run. Carter, working out of a Gothic and feminist tradition she had been building across her novels, treats the source tales as pre-patriarchal raw material and rewrites them with unapologetic attention to consent, hunger, and what women do when they stop pretending to be prey.
What you might want to know about The Bloody Chamber
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Angela Carter rewrites European fairy tales as ten gothic, sensuous, and unsettling stories for adults, including a young pianist's marriage to a French marquis with a locked room and a Beast who takes off his human face.
The Bloody Chamber was written by Angela Carter and published in 1979. The collection retells fairy tales (including Bluebeard, Beauty and the Beast, and Little Red Riding Hood) with feminist, gothic, and erotic undercurrents.
Yes. The Bloody Chamber is a 1979 collection of ten fairy-tale-based short stories, including the title novella and stories like The Tiger's Bride, The Werewolf, and The Company of Wolves. The Company of Wolves was adapted into a 1984 Neil Jordan film.
The Bloody Chamber is 128 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Bloody Chamber takes most readers 2 to 3 hours to finish.
The Bloody Chamber is a standalone novel by an unknown author, not part of a series.
The Bloody Chamber is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
