The Real Magic of Angela Carter

Abstract

Lizzie and Emma Borden in the long, slow days before slaughter made them famous — unimaginable indeed, even by the narrator of ‘The Fall River Axe Murders’, the lead story in Angela Carter’s Saints and Strangers (1986). Not much else escapes, though as the narrator’s inquisitive, relentless, unabashedly modern intelligence broods over the legendary house at 92 Second Street, Fall River, and its sleeping inhabitants, two of whom will soon — very soon — die horribly. It is the last instant before 6:00 AM, 4 August, 1892; a hundred factory whistles ‘are just about to blast off, just this very second about to blass off … ‘ (Saints and Strangers, 12). Carter suspends time, lets murderer and victims sleep, while she ponders, digresses, speculates; long before the end we seem to know exactly why Lizzie will murder her parents, but then, in the last line, magic: ‘Outside, above, in the already burning air, see! the angel of death roosts on the roof-tree’ (Saints and Strangers, 31).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.