Angela Carter 

"She produced her own haunting, mocking - sometimes tender - variations on some classic motifs of the genre: the Red Riding Hood story, bluebeard, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast. (...) for in retelling these tales she was deliberately drawing them out of their set shapes, out of the separate space of 'children stories' or 'folk art', and into the world of change. It was yet another assault on myth - though this time done caressingly and seductively. The monsters and the princesses lose their places in the old script, and cross the forbidden binary lines.

She could experiment with her own writer's role, ally herself in imagination with the countless, anonymous narrators who stood behind literary redactors like Perrault or (much later), the brothers Grimm.

So, with the Sade book and the bloody chamber, she rounded off the decade triumphantly. The fairy tale idea enabled her to read in public with new appropriateness and panache, as though she was telling these stories."

Sage, L. (2006). Angela Carter. Liverpool University Press. Part of the Writers and Their Work series. (p.39 - 40)

• First Edition 1979
• Author: Angela Carter
• Cover artist: Malcolm Ashman 
• Publisher Gollancz (UK) & Harper & Row (US)