British author who reshaped motifs from mythology, legends, and fairy tales in her books, lending them a ghastly humour and eroticism.

Carter rejected an Oxford education to work as a journalist with the Croydon Advertiser, but she later studied medieval literature at the University of Bristol (B.A., 1965). She had moderate success with her novels Shadow Dance (1966; also published as Honeybuzzard) and The Magic Toyshop (1967; filmed 1986). Her other novels include Several Perceptions (1968), The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), The Passion of New Eve (1977), and Wise Children (1991). Carter's fiction gained new popularity in the 1980s, notably after the release of the motion picture The Company of Wolves (1984), which she cowrote; the film was based on a story from The Bloody Chamber (1979), a collection of her adaptations of fairy tales. Her interest in the macabre and the sensual was reflected in The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (1979), a polemical study of the female characters in the writings of the marquis de Sade. She also wrote radio plays, children's books, and essays.