The Magic Toyshop

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Overview

One night Melanie walks through the garden in her mother's wedding dress. The next morning her world is shattered. Forced to leave the comfortable home of her childhood, she is sent to London to live with relatives she has never met: Aunt Margaret, beautiful and speechless, and her brothers, Francie, whose graceful music belies his clumsy nature, and the volatile Finn, who kisses Melanie in the ruins of the pleasure gardens. And brooding Unlce Philip loves only the life-sized wooden puppets he creates in his toyshop. This classic gothic novel established Angela Carter as one of our most imaginative writers and augurs the themes of her later creative ...

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Overview

One night Melanie walks through the garden in her mother's wedding dress. The next morning her world is shattered. Forced to leave the comfortable home of her childhood, she is sent to London to live with relatives she has never met: Aunt Margaret, beautiful and speechless, and her brothers, Francie, whose graceful music belies his clumsy nature, and the volatile Finn, who kisses Melanie in the ruins of the pleasure gardens. And brooding Unlce Philip loves only the life-sized wooden puppets he creates in his toyshop. This classic gothic novel established Angela Carter as one of our most imaginative writers and augurs the themes of her later creative work.

Dora and Nora Chance are a famous song-and-dance team of the British music halls. Billed as The Lucky Chances, the sisters are the illegitimate and unacknowledged daughters of Sir Melchoir Hazard, the greatest Shakespearean actor of his day. At once ribald and sentimental, glittery and tender, this rambunctious family saga is Angela Carter at her bewitching best.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
Carter, a splendid British writer ( The Magic Toyshop ; Nights at the Circus ) all too little known here, has a real winner in this giddy tale of a highly eccentric British theatrical family. Nora and Dora Chance are twin sisters, former vaudeville dancers not beyond some high-stepping sex even at age 75, living in a once rundown but newly smart area of South London. Dora tells their tale, and her narrative voice is a triumph: deeply feminine, ribald, self-deprecating (on their birth: ``We came bursting out on a Monday morning, on a day of sunshine and high wind when the Zeppelins were falling''). Their mother, seduced by the legendary actor Sir Melchior Hazard, dies giving birth; the girls are brought up by the landlady, and eventually come to nurture one of Melchior's several cast-off wives. Meanwhile, his brother Peregrine, who once set off to wander the world. . . . The extravagant family comes together for a lavish 100th birthday party for British institution Sir Melchior, at which skeletons galore clatter out in full view of a national TV audience. The party is one magnificently unforgettable set-piece. The other is the filming, in Hollywood in the late '30s, of a terrible version of A Midsummer Night's Dream , by a culture-mad producer--one of the funniest and most deadly portraits of moviedom ever penned. But the whole book is comic writing of the highest order: spry, witty, earthy and oddly touching at times. It was a large success in Britain, and deserves to do as well here. (Jan.)
Library Journal
Originally published as Honeybuzzard (LJ 1/1/67), Shadow Dance launched British author Carter's career, which she buttressed with The Magic Toyshop two years later. Both received praise from LJ's reviewers, especially the latter novel, which was hailed as an "extraordinary, even brilliant piece of writing" (LJ 2/1/68).
More Reviews (2) Fewer Reviews
Joyce Carol Oates
"'Wise Children' inhabits its own manic universe and would probably translate into a spirited, bawdy musical comedy-farce of the kind in which the Chance sisters themselves performed, long ago." -- New York Times Book Review
Kirkus Reviews
Historical events and personages viewed as in a distorting mirror, and beasts of prey endangered by encounters with their chosen quarry, are representative of the charmingly deranged fiction of the late Carter (194093).

Carter's impertinent revisions of cherished conventions and beloved traditional stories do not elicit mild or neutral reactions from readers. As her friend Salman Rushdie suggests in his warm introduction to this rich collection of 42 stories (spanning the years 196293), one is either pleasurably seduced by her languorous imagery and overripe vocabulary, or made slightly ill by her intemperate romantic sensuality: you love her or you hate her. Even those attuned to Carter's perfervid imagination will have to pick and choose their way through a minefield of knotty prose and naughtier conceits, from several decidedly precious early tales through the contents of her acclaimed story volumes (such as The Bloody Chamber and Saints and Strangers) to a final three uncollected pieces that are even more hothouse-baroque than her usual work. If you can bypass the gamy contes cruels that show Carter at her worst, there's much to enjoy in her wry feminist response to the smug mandates of sexism, racism . . . come to think of it, most -isms. "The Bloody Chamber" amusingly reinvents the Bluebeard legend, featuring a virginal bride reluctant to become yet another passive victim; "The Fall River Axe Murders" examines Lizzie Borden from a sardonic female perspective; "Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night's Dream" retells Shakespeare's comedy from the viewpoint of the changeling child for whom fairy rulers Oberon and Titania contend. And in the amazing "Our Lady of the Massacre," Carter employs the familiar narrative of (American) Indian captivity to create in a mere 14 pages a brilliantly compact near-novella.

A book of wonders, then, even if too cloying for some tastes—and a welcome occasion for reassessing the work of one of the most unusual writers of recent emergence.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780140256406
  • Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
  • Publication date: 8/28/1996
  • Edition description: Reprint
  • Pages: 208
  • Sales rank: 266,972
  • Series: Anthology Series
  • Product dimensions: 5.10 (w) x 7.78 (h) x 0.55 (d)

Meet the Author

Angela Carter (1940 -1992) wrote nine novels and numerous short stories, as well as nonfiction, radio plays, and the screenplay for Neil Jordan's 1984 movie The Company of Wolves, based on her story. She won numerous literary awards, traveled and taught widely in the United States, and lived in London.

Table of Contents

Introduction
The Man Who Loved a Double Bass 3
A Very, Very Great Lady and Her Son at Home 11
A Victorian Fable (with Glossary) 16
A Souvenir of Japan 27
The Executioner's Beautiful Daughter 35
The Loves of Lady Purple 41
The Smile of Winter 52
Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest 58
Flesh and the Mirror 68
Master 75
Reflections 81
Elegy for a Freelance 96
The Bloody Chamber 111
The Courtship of Mr Lyon 144
The Tiger's Bride 154
Puss-in-Boots 170
The Erl-King 186
The Snow Child 193
The Lady of the House of Love 195
The Werewolf 210
The Company of Wolves 212
Wolf-Alice 221
Black Venus 231
The Kiss 245
Our Lady of the Massacre 248
The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe 262
Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night's Dream 273
Peter and the Wolf 284
The Kitchen Child 292
The Fall River Axe Murders 300
Lizzie's Tiger 321
John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore 332
Gun for the Devil 349
The Merchant of Shadows 363
The Ghost Ships 376
In Pantoland 382
Ashputtle or The Mother's Ghost 390
Alice in Prague or The Curious Room 397
Impressions: The Wrightsman Magdalene 409
The Scarlet House 417
The Snow Pavilion 429
The Quilt Maker 444
Appendix: Afterword to Fireworks 459
First Publications 461

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