SOURCE: Zipes, Jack. “Crossing Boundaries with Wise Girls: Angela Carter's Fairy Tales for Children.” Marvels and Tales: Journal of Fairy Tale Studies 12, no. 1 (1998): 147-54.

In the following essay, Zipes examines Carter's early fairy tales for children for elements she would use later in her postmodern revisionist tales.

Long before Angela Carter had conceived the tales for her remarkable collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979), she had begun experimenting with the fairy-tale genre in two highly sophisticated picture books for children, Miss Z, the Dark Young Lady (1970) and The Donkey Prince (1970), both illustrated by Eros Keith. Neglected by critics and unknown to most readers, these two tales actually laid the groundwork for Carter's future work and reveal some of her basic concepts with regard to the revisionist fairy-tale tradition. All this makes Carter's stories worth reconsidering. But even more than shedding light on her development as an innovative...