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Angela Carter's ‘The Sadeian Woman’ and Female Desire in England 1960–
1975
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DOI: 10.1080/09612025.2014.906840
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Angela Carter's ‘The Sadeian Woman’

and Female Desire in England
1960–1975
Hera Cook
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To cite this article: Hera Cook (2014) Angela Carter's ‘The Sadeian Woman’ and Female Desire in
England 1960–1975, Women's History Review, 23:6, 938-956, DOI: 10.1080/09612025.2014.906840
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Women’s History Review, 2014
Vol. 23, No. 6, 938 –956, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2014.906840
Angela Carter’s ‘The Sadeian Woman’

and Female Desire in England
1960– 1975
Hera Cook
In The Sadeian Woman (1979) Angela Carter suggested that the visions of free
female sexuality created by the Marquis de Sade in his violent pornographic novels
provided insight into existing female sexualities in her own—British—society. In
this article the representation of female sexuality in novels set in contemporary
British society, written by women, and published between 1960 and 1975, is examined
in relation to Carter’s exegesis of the good, virtuous Justine and the meretricious, sexu-
ally desirous Juliette, two contrasting characters from Sade’s work. The limitations of
the three other alternatives present in the novels are described; containment within
long-term marriage, good-hearted promiscuity; and the rejection of emotional
repression. Then Carter’s own solution to women’s sexual inequality is placed in
the context of feminism in the late 1970s, and the role of the novels in contributing
to change is acknowledged.
Angela Carter (1940 –92) was an English author of speculative and elegant gothic
novels and a journalist.1 She was commissioned to write The Sadeian Woman for
the launch of the feminist Virago Press in 1977. The book begins with a chapter on
the social construction of sexuality that rejects the mythologising of motherhood
and of women’s bodies. Concluding this chapter, Carter suggests, ‘In the looking-
glass of Sade’s misanthropy, women may see themselves as they have been and it is
an uncomfortable sight’.2 Chapters on novels by Marquis de Sade (1740 –1814)
Hera Cook is a historian in the Department of Public Health Otago, Wellington, New Zealand. She has published
on the history of British sexuality and emotion and is interested in the use of history in the context of social policy
and activism. Correspondence to: Dr Hera Cook, Department of Public Health, University of Otago, 23 Mein
Street, Newton, PO Box 7343, Wellington 6021, New Zealand. Email: hera.cook@otago.ac.nz
# 2014 Taylor & Francis

Women’s History Review 939
follow, including Justine (1791), Juliette (1798) and Philosophy in the Boudoir.3 In
this article, I will use Carter’s analysis of Sade’s work as a frame within which to
examine the visions of heterosexual female sexuality available to women in her
own society. The 1960s and 70s were a moment of flux during which a transform-
ation of sexual mores and gender roles was taking place as the social and material
conditions shaping female sexuality shifted.4 Carter constructed female desire as
largely passive and responsive to men both in her novels and in this text. Critics
responded to this negatively and as if it were purely a function of her imagination.
It was, however, accepted almost without question in British sources (including
sex manuals, psychoanalytic texts, autobiographies, therapy sessions) prior to
the 1970s that, with few exceptions, women were passive in relation to physical
sexual activity and were not aroused in the context of expectations that they
should initiate sexual activity (that is they were not aroused by sexually ‘timid’
men).5 By the mid-1970s when Carter began making notes for The Sadeian
Woman, it was possible to look back at a decade and a half during which
women increasingly expected to be sexually active outside their roles as mothers
and wives, when courting, and to start asking what this meant for women.6
Carter explained that she chose Sade as the focus for such an enquiry because
he claimed ‘rights of free sexuality for women, and . . . [installed] women as
beings of power in his imaginary worlds’.7
Reviewers initially responded to The Sadeian Woman as if it were about the
ethics of pornography, which was emerging as a major issue within feminism in
the late 1970s as the book was published.8 In this context, literary critics and
reviewers, already discomforted by the apparently glib acceptance of violence
against women in Carter’s novels, struggled to make sense of her admixture of
ironic comment and intense seriousness about Sade and female sexuality. It is
easy now to forget how rare and genuinely shocking it was for British women
to write/talk explicitly about sexuality in the 1970s. The creation of sexual material
was largely a male preserve. Passages in the introduction about pornography pro-
vided a hook on which to hang an interpretation that was further justified by the
negative comment The Sadeian Woman elicited from Andrea Dworkin in her
germinal text, Pornography (1981), and the more sustained rejection from
Suzanne Kappeller in 1986.9 Pro-sex feminists opposed to this perspective and
later critics have focused on the relationship between this text and Carter’s multi-
layered treatment of femininity and sexuality in her fiction rather than relating the
text to her society, as she herself did.10
In The Sadeian Woman Carter mentions other female novelists in passing.11 In a
letter to Lorna Sage in 1977, she made some more extended comments. She had
met Elizabeth Smart, author of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
(1954), at a party. Carter reported that Smart said ‘“It is hard for women”’, and
continued:
It was a very peculiar experience because she clearly wanted to talk in polished
gnomic epigrams about anguish and death and boredom and I honestly
couldn’t think of anything to say. Except that I understand why men hate
940 H. Cook
women and they are right, yes right. . . . . I don’t mean to sound hard. I mean I
am sure her life has been astoundingly tragic. And I began to plot a study of the
Jean Rhys/E. Smart/E. O’Brien woman titled self-inflicted wounds.12
In this article, I am reading The Sadeian Woman as that study. In her letter to Sage,
Carter continued: ‘I am moved . . . by the desire that no daughter of mine should
ever be in a position to write: By Grand Central Station I sat Down and Wept . . .
(By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Tore His Balls Off would be more
like it, I should hope)’.13 This situates her text firmly in the context of second-
wave feminism (if the connection with Virago were not already sufficient) but,
it is important to note, before the emergence of the full-blown feminist anti-por-
nography movement at the end of the 1970s.
Novels by women suggest that the choices Carter saw for women in The Sadeian
Woman were a heightened and poetic version of those that women had been
making in the society around her. This research examines naturalistic, literary
or non-genre, novels written by British women, set in contemporary British
society and first published from 1960 to 1975. The intention in looking at
novels was to obtain a sense of how women who wrote novels were imagining
and writing about women’s emotional experience, and whether, or how, that
shifted during those fifteen years. Novels show the reader what was conceivable,
what was desirable, what was rejected or accepted at an imaginative level in the
novelists’ society. Cultural historian Frank Mort defined fantasy in relation to
plans for the future of London as ‘the conscious construction . . . [of that
which] was in excess of the socially possible or politically acceptable’.14 Naturalistic
novels are similarly both tethered to and moving beyond existing conditions. Mort
also suggests that we need ‘to make histories of the emotions and of fantasy, not as
random or unique fabrications, but as shaped by the contingencies of their
respective presents and articulated in accents that have a history’.15 This definition
of fantasy anchors it in the world, but despite the apparent pragmatism, giving
social shape to fantasy creates space for histories that can encompass the unex-
pected, the extraordinary, the changes that comes from nowhere to shift, or
reshape or transform society, the changes that are the unintended consequences
of the social relations of power. Carter’s extreme and fantastical Sadeian looking
glass reflects the emotional intensity of these novels and provides a frame
within which it is possible to interpret this female imaginary.
The initial research intention was to include in the sample all naturalistic, non-
genre novels by British women about life in contemporary Britain, and first pub-
lished from 1960 to 1975, which reached lists of bestsellers. No such lists could be
found prior to the mid-1970s, and paperback publication was instead taken to
indicate that the novel was a success with readers. One hundred and sixty-
three novels were found that met the criteria and these were read in chronological
order of publication.16 A third of the thirty-nine novelists had secondary-level, or
less, education, 23% went to provincial and London universities, 28% to
Oxbridge and 15% had other tertiary education, such as pharmacy training.
Nearly a third had upper-, or upper-middle-class fathers, half the fathers were
middle class and around 20% were working class.17 The novelists ranged from
minor aristocracy to socially mobile women from backgrounds of working-
class poverty. The most notable division among them is not, however, class of
origin but that between those novelists accepted by, or part of, an Oxbridge/
London high-cultural elite, who enjoyed reading about people like themselves
and who decided what constituted literary quality, and those novelists who
were not so accepted, whatever their class of origin. With some important excep-
tions, the novelists conform to the literary expectations of the former sector of
British society.
The novelists fall into three loose cultural generations: those who came of age
before World War II; those who came of age in the 1940s and 50s; and those
who came of age during the 1960s. I have elsewhere defined as harbingers of
change the tiny proportion of young, mainly middle-class women who began in
the late 1950s to have open sexual affairs with men whom they did not intend
to marry, using contraception and abortion to control the consequences.18 The
two younger generations of novelists were among those harbingers of change,
and they responded strongly to the changes taking place in the 1960s and 70s.
My original assumption was that there would be a time lag of some years
between the observation that contributes to a novel and the publication of the fin-
ished text. The characters and situations depicted in the novels changed at a pace
that was, however, very consistent with other evidence.19
Greater restrictions on, as well as greater concealment, of female sexual feelings,
bodies and behaviour was usual in everyday British life compared to elsewhere in
the western world and the novels reflected this.20 Within that context, there is a
substantial change in attitudes to physical sexuality and emotion in the novels
over this period. A woman can still be portrayed as learning she likes sex or is
in love in the process of being raped in the first half of the 1960s.21 Physical
detail is just beginning to be present in women’s novels, which are, as a body of
work, far more sexually reticent than those of men. Physical sexual events, primar-
ily heterosexual coitus, occurred in over half the narratives and descriptions of
these events became more detailed over the period. In Gillian Freeman’s
(b.1929) The Liberty Man (1955) sexual intercourse was not described. The
event took place between one paragraph and the next, between the seduction
and the post-coital conversation.22 By the 1960s, the novelists were starting actu-
ally to describe sexual events, albeit briefly.23 There was a range of female responses
to heterosexual sexual intercourse in the novels. Some female characters experi-
enced intense sexual desire and pleasure, some felt bored or disconnected, and
some felt used and loathed the experience. Descriptions of non-consensual sex
did not increase over the period, in contrast to accounts of eroticised sexual vio-
lence, which did.24 Sexual activity was usually portrayed as being managed by
men, with women at most indirectly prodding, or exciting, males into action.
Where female characters did initiate sex, they were often ill intentioned or mercen-
ary.25 Although lesbian characters appeared frequently in novels throughout the
period, with few exceptions they did not engage in physical sexual activity.26 By
the 1970s, the meanings attached by the novelists to the act of coitus had
942 H. Cook
become more varied than was the case in the early 1960s. Sexual intercourse could
be a highly meaningful act, such as a consummate gesture of love, an act of suicidal
self-destruction or a casual encounter in which emotion was almost wholly absent.
The range of choices made by female characters had widened accordingly.
Justine and Adultery

The meaning of sexual activity derives from the beliefs and emotional attitudes of
women. The attitudes of Sade’s character Justine predominate in these novels.
Carter describes her as ‘the virtuous, the interesting Justine, [who] with her
incompetence, her gullibility, her whining, her frigidity, her reluctance to take
control of her own life, is a perfect woman’.27 In the novel named after her
character, the virginal Justine is reduced to poverty following the death of her
father. In spite of her attempts to be good and kind, those people she encounters
constantly betray her, and she fails persistently and disastrously to help others
when she tries to do so. She struggles to retain her virginity and when, against
her will, she is fucked, she knows she remains good because she does not feel
pleasure. Unlike Juliette, her sexually perverse, wicked sister, she does feel love
and pain.28 In the novels and autobiographies, it is the choices and problems
facing actively sexual women that concern the novelists. Virginity is no
longer important but what defines a good woman is still Justine’s
emotions, love and pain. She is now sexually active but still locked into the
emotional behaviour of a dependant. Throughout the 1960s and early 70s, the
most important theme in the novels is adultery; it causes good women
immense pain.
The Mirage (1965) by Andrea Newman (b.1938) was a strikingly painful novel
but the elements making up the plot were not unusual.29 Jane lived with Dino
before marriage, he initiated her into wonderful loving sex, and they talked to
each other. Dino’s capacity to create a loving and passionate sexual experience
for women was described as unusual by the characters. Other women, as well as
Jane, contrasted him to the majority of men, who could not do this. Later, after
their marriage, she has two miscarriages and decides not to try for a child for a
while, but with no job, she has little to occupy her. She gradually realises Dino
is, and will continue to be, persistently unfaithful. Her grief at this leads her to
leave him and then apply for a divorce. He remarries a pretty actress who promptly
has a child. Jane realises she cannot live without loving sex with Dino and goes to
see him. At the end of the book, she is now the mistress and he comes to see her
once a week. The mistress and the wife are proved to be no different; they can
change places and the man’s role continues unchanged. Jane’s experience of para-
dise has proved to be a mirage.
Middle-class women’s fiction of this period presents a very different picture to
that of the past. It suggests that middle-class men now had affairs with women not
unlike their wives instead of going to women of a lower class or to prostitutes.
These women often already had, or then went on to marry men not unlike
those with whom they had affairs. The traditional sexual division between good
and bad women had been eroded. Carter comments that ‘Justine’s organ of per-
ception is the heart that forbids her to engage in certain activities she feels to be
immoral’.30 In The Mirage (1965) Jane is aware of her feelings and cannot be
‘rational’ about Dino’s infidelity.31 At the end of the novel, this has had terrible
costs for her. Her life as it existed was dependent on her ignoring her feelings,
which are, like those of Justine, her guide to morality. However, though Dino’s
lying to Jane as his wife devastated her, as his mistress Jane colludes in lying to
his new wife without comment. What we can see here is the operation of Justine’s
heart. These novels reveal ‘the moral limitations of a life conducted solely accord-
ing to the virtuous promptings of the heart’.32 Carter comments that Justine is a
bourgeois individualist with no sense of identification with the pain of others:
‘during the first game of “cut-the-cord,” Justine tells the reader how she feels an
immense sense of happiness and peace when she realises that her companion
Suzanne is to die and not Justine herself ’.33 There was almost no awareness
admitted by women of the ‘other’ woman, the wife or the mistress, let alone
concern for this other woman, in the novels of the early 1960s.34 Carter
continues, ‘doing good implies a social context of action, a whole system of
social relations and Justine has been involuntarily deprived of this system, She
does not even know it exists. She is a child who knows how to be good to
please daddy’.35
In the early 1970s, infidelity was still by far the most important source of dis-
tress to the characters, though from the later 1960s the characters were becoming
aware that the men who lie to their wives are also lying to their mistresses.36
There were new storylines which often involved casual sex on the part of the
woman and extended coverage of the period after the end of the marriage. In
Bernice Rubens’ (b.1923) Go Tell the Lemming (1973), monogamy was not an
option for Angela, as her husband had left her after being unfaithful and a
routine liar for ten years.37 He continued to lie about his intention to return
to her, something she desperately wanted. The climax of the novel comes when
Angela discovers he had also been lying to his new partner, telling her that
she, Angela, refuses to see him or give him a divorce. Angela was actively pro-
miscuous but it is shown in the novel that it was not the (very) casual sex
which killed Angela, although it led directly to her murder; rather it was her atti-
tude to herself and other women that led to her death. She did not change. She
continued to look to men for confirmation of her existence and value and to
blame the ‘other woman’ rather than her husband for his behaviour. The
novel’s title suggests Rubens was exploring this behaviour rather than endorsing
her character (though she, along with several other major female novelists of the
period, consistently rejected feminism).38 Novels like these were starting to make
sense of the misery suffered by Jane in The Mirage (1965). The emotional tone of
these two examples is intense but in all the novels read there was an absence of
alternatives for women, so long as they continued to focus on marriage as the
central event of their life or to depend on men for emotional sustenance.
Women who could love only one man had no defences when he abandoned
the morality they were living by.
944 H. Cook
Juliette
A new female character emerged in these fictions in the late 1960s: Juliette, Jus-
tine’s wicked sister. Carter described Juliette:
Her sexual affairs are engaged in either for profit or for fun; she is contemptu-
ous, embarrassed by professions of love. When ... I try to imagine what she
might look like ... I see no more resonant image than that of the Cosmopolitan
girl—hard, bright, dazzling, meretricious. She plays to win, she knows the
score.39
In the novels, this new character was always sexually promiscuous because the pro-
miscuous woman need not be dependent on one man financially or, more impor-
tantly, emotionally. She might or might not enjoy sexual variation but she always
performed gamely when required.40
This new character was often an unashamedly chaotic and untidy housekeeper
and she had intimate female friends and associates, rather than basing her identity
on romantic relationships, as does Justine.41 She might talk back, or make
demands, in which case the novel will be comic. The humour reveals the extent
to which appropriate feminine behaviour is deferential in British culture. In the
novels, delicate, sensitive, feminine behaviour of the right sort entails accepting
existing unequal gender power relations, without acknowledging that they exist.
When women do not behave in the expected deferential fashion, they become
comic as well as being portrayed as selfish and unkind. In The World is Full of
Married Men (1968), by Jackie Collins (b.1937 approx.), when the wife and the
mistress say things that do not fit in with what the husband expects and wants,
he does not hear them. Generally, this also does not fit in with conventional
ideas about women. Here he persists in believing his young mistress will want
to marry him if he is free:
She had annoyed him with her little speech about not wanting to marry him.
But really he wasn’t too annoyed because on thinking it over he decided she
had only said it as a defence mechanism.42
In this novel women often insist on what they want; as a result they get more of
what they want. When the husband’s wife chucks him out, he tells Claudia, the
mistress, that he has left his wife for her:
[Claudia] shook her head in disbelief. ‘You really left her for me, isn’t that wild!’
‘I’m going to divorce her and marry you,’ he said firmly . . . [Claudia responded]
‘Listen, baby—lets get clear on the subject. I don’t—do not have, I repeat, any
desire to make the wedding bells scene—so don’t keep on making the offer like
it’s such a damn big deal. I don’t want to marry you!’ She was almost shouting,
and sensing her mood, he dropped the subject.43
Note the bluntly ironic use of ‘sensing her mood’ to describe this man becoming
aware of a woman who is ‘almost shouting’ at him.
This was Collins’ first novel, and she drew on her experience, as did many of the
novelists writing in this period.44 Collins’ experience was very different to that of
the other novelists in the sample; she was accused of writing a pornographic novel
by Tom Driberg, a journalist and Member of Parliament (MP), who added that he
had never read a nastier novel.45 Collins was unafraid of being directly challenging
to men, telling The Guardian in 1969 that ‘this novel [is] a kind of sweet revenge
“for all the men I met in the [movie] business who regard women as commodities,
as so much meat”’.46 In 1974, she was happy to agree that she had ‘Women’s Lib
views’, unlike major literary female novelists.47 The attitudes and lifestyles of the
character Claudia, a model and would-be movie starlet, are strikingly rare in
the sample of novels, though there are a number of memoirs by women that
describe similar experiences, which include casual, sometimes commercial,
sexual encounters interspersed with love affairs, among them lesbian
relationships.48
Margaret Forster’s (b.1938) Georgy Girl (1965) describes young women creating
a variety of relationships in which men are dispensable.49 Characters with the attri-
butes of Juliette are stoical; love does not make them vulnerable.50 They repeatedly
overturn conventional values: Meredith does not shave her legs, has several boy-
friends and when she stops her regular abortions, marries and has a baby it is
for no apparent reason, rather than because she has fallen in love. Georgy, her
housemate, who feels intense sexual desire even though she has not been ‘awa-
kened’ by a man, starts an affair with Meredith’s husband but he becomes disillu-
sioned because she prefers the baby, which Meredith has put up for adoption, to
him. The novel concludes with Georgy agreeing to marry a rich man because he
will support her and the baby. In this novel, the men are more likely to retreat
with hurt feelings than the women. Carter comments that ‘[Juliette] is a woman
who acts according to the precepts and also the practice of a man’s world and
so she does not suffer. Instead, she causes suffering’.51 Characters with the qualities
of Juliette were very much less prominent as a character type in novels by British
women than Justine.
Carter concluded:
Justine is the thesis, Juliette the antithesis; both are without hope and neither
pays any heed to a future in which might lie the possibility of a synthesis of
their modes of being, neither submissive nor aggressive, capable of both
thought and feeling.52
Carter’s interpretation of Sade was a plea for women to transcend these choices,
but Sade, unsurprisingly, failed her here. All Carter could find was the suggestion
that if the virtuous Madame Mistival were to feel transgressive sexual pleasure,
this would be proof that change is possible from good to evil and, therefore,
also possible in reverse.53
The major alternative to Juliette and Justine in the work of the novelists was the
pragmatic and sensible wife whose life was devoted to supporting her faithful
husband and who enjoyed restrained marital sex. The novelists depicted these
couples as having sexual relations in which the wife was permitted some influence
over events so long as the convention that the husband initiated and controlled
sexual activity was preserved.54 In novels of the late 1960s and early 1970s the
smug complacency of these happily subordinate wives was disturbed by a new
946 H. Cook
character: a young, sexually active girl who was portrayed as pathetic, predatory
and self-destructive.55 Even when it was a seventeen-year-old girl adult men
were confronted with, the older female characters in these novels continued to
believe that the female, not the male, should be held responsible for any sexual be-
haviour that took place. The absence of intense distress in the lives of these char-
acters was accompanied by an absence of intense passion and excitement.
Alternative Visions
Two novels of the 1970s, responding in different ways to the challenges raised by
the period, did offer alternatives. Molly Parkin’s (b.1932) Love All (1974) created
and sustained a new structure of sexual feeling.56 The set-up for the novel—
deserted wife left with children, financially humiliated by husband—and

elements of Myopia’s character are very similar to that of earlier distressed
wives.57 Like the central characters in other novels, Myopia was told it was a
fault that she was so incredibly, almost implausibly, willing to please sexually
and otherwise. But Myopia learned not to need her husband, or other heterosex-
ual men, emotionally. At the point in the novel where the emotional climax is
expected, there is a detailed how-to-guide episode of anal sex. This novel is
trying to have it both ways, retaining the kindness of Justine while adopting
the polymorphous sexual and emotional perversity of Juliette. The novel can
be read as a narrative about Myopia becoming sexually independent and rejecting
dependence on an emotional home/love. Placed against the many novels of
female desperation, or marital safety and submission, this appears to be a positive
way forward.
What militates against this interpretation is Myopia’s ongoing sexual passivity
and Parkin’s own alcoholism and her artistic block in the period after her own phi-
landering husband and she separated.58 At this stage the contradictions in the sol-
ution found thus far to the irreconcilable needs of men and women in the novels of
the early 1960s become apparent. More sex from easily available women was what
many men wanted. In her autobiography, Parkin mentions that John Mortimer,
the novelist Penelope Mortimer’s ex-husband, and the model for emotionally
insensitive Jake in The Pumpkin Eater (1962), had been one of her ‘lovers’.59 By
the early 1970s, Penelope Mortimer had become one of the older women who
were seen as outside the sexual round, and was on the verge of a nervous break-
down, while John Mortimer was introduced on the television chat show Wogan
as ‘the famous playwright, lawyer and womaniser’, and announcing that ‘I can’t
feel loyalty to a wife simply because she’s my wife’.60 Independent sexual activity
of Parkin’s sort was a solution for women only so long as they remained
unaware of the very short step between themselves as the loved object and
themselves as the discarded and despised other. Within their belief system, the
only way most women had to reject treating themselves as the things that libertine
men of the 1960s would make them was to restrict or refuse sexual contact. They
were not as far from Samuel Richardson’s Pamela as they appeared to be. Carter
commented that:
Paradoxically, Justine’s only triumph is her refusal to treat herself as a thing,

although everybody else she meets does. ... it remains a victory in a void. She
is the bourgeois individualist in its tragic aspect; her sister Juliette, offers its
heroic side. Both are women whose identities have been entirely shaped by
men.61
In contrast, Tear His Head Off His Shoulders (1974) by Nell Dunn (b.1936)
acknowledges the need for transcendence, and it is about the desire and the
attempt to change. This is astonishingly rare in British women’s novels of the
period. Even where the novelists have become aware that something is inherently
wrong with the situation in which women find themselves they cannot imagine
positive change in the lives of their characters. Dunn’s novel is about the possibility
of change away from this state of victimhood, and to something other than Juli-
ette. Her first book, Up the Junction, was about the non-respectable working-class
women she met in Battersea, then a run-down London suburb. As new alternatives
to nuclear families such as communes were created during the 1970s, she wrote
about those. Dunn was from a background of minor aristocracy, and her work
was criticised as presenting a patronising and clichéd view of the working class,
but it is evident that she was searching for alternative emotional approaches to
those accepted throughout all classes of respectable English society. The absence
of other positive portrayals of sexually active, non-respectable working-class
women in this sample of novels by women is striking.
Tear His Head Off His Shoulders was about the attempt of Jeanette, a middle-
class, middle-aged librarian, to overcome her fear of expressing need for
another person and to come to terms with having rejected her married lover’s
offer to leave his wife because of that fear. Carter comments that ‘repression is Jus-
tine’s whole being—repression of sex, of anger and of her own violence’.62 Jean-
ette’s body revealed her emotions. She remembers repressing her distress and
finding sexually:
I was all stiff and dry and he literally couldn’t get in—although I so desperately
wanted everything ‘to be all right’ that I tried to let him in. But my body
wouldn’t comply with my lies.63
Sexual feeling, sexual violence and emotional repression were directly connected
for Jeanette. The background to the novel was a relationship with a married
man in which Jeanette learnt that being hit by him enabled her to release emotion-
al and sexual control. She was able to be sexually loving when hit but even then,
she recalls, she still kept hidden her neediness and intense feelings. Being hit
enabled her to let go sexually but, she tells the reader, never once did she get angry.
Moving into a London rooming house six years after the relationship ended, she
meets Queenie who lives downstairs. Fifty-year-old, working-class Queenie’s life,
including working as a prostitute and numerous love affairs, is presented as a series
of acts of pleasure, defiance and energy, in contrast to Jeanette’s five years of des-
perate misery with one married man. Queenie has a nervous breakdown following
her humiliation at the hands of a middle-class senior social worker when she
applies for a job in what was then a respected middle-class profession. This
948 H. Cook
acknowledgement of the injuries inflicted by class prevents Queenie’s life appear-

ing an alternative to middle-class repression. Jeanette stops work to nurse her. She
gradually accepts Queenie’s body. Walking arm in arm, occasionally sleeping in the
same bed, delighting in watching her dress or walk, physical contact between the
two women is presented not as sexual feeling but as intense physical intimacy.
Jeanette massages the sore toothless gums right down inside Queenie’s mouth
and comments wonderingly on her own lack of repulsion.64 Her intrusion into
the contained, controlled, private, dirty space of the mouth is an act of intense
intimacy and courage for Jeanette. She gradually falls in love with Queenie, and
Queenie asks her to move in with her. Jeanette retreats, terrified, and refuses as
she refused to demand her lover stay with her when he asked her to do so.
Queenie leaves with a man and the novel ends with Jeanette committing
suicide. Thus the attempt at change fails but, nonetheless, Jeanette is still
outside the world of Justine and Juliette. That the novel concludes with her
suicide highlights how impossible this generation found conceiving of change
away from Justine’s distress and misery, without Juliette’s corresponding growth
in insensitivity and denial of romantic passion.
Detailed description of bodies began to appear in the novels for the first time in
the 1970s; this includes genitals, both in relation to sex and generally; younger
writers start to mention toilets and peeing. Many of the characters were not com-
fortable with naked bodies and they feel about them much as someone who finds
snails disgusting might write about discovering that the slime actually feels rather
nice, if you force yourself to let the thing crawl across your hand. Fay Weldon
writes about rejecting actual sexual bodies: ‘Jocelyn wears her bra in bed. She
doesn’t like the feeling of her breasts flopping and bobbing. Neither come to
that does Phillip, but he’s not aware of it yet’.65
This notion of discomfort with bodies was not at odds with the frequently dis-
cussed compulsive male pursuit of young women; perfect young female bodies
were things, objects for men to appreciate. The apparent relationship between
the growing working-class content in British women’s novels in the early 1970s
and more detail about bodies and sex is also misleading. Queenie refers to
being ‘nude like a lady’ several times and working-class Brenda in Beryl Bain-
bridge’s The Bottle Factory Outing (1974) will not let other inhabitants of the
house know when she is using the toilet.66 Parkin and Margaret Drabble both
describe middle-class women taking the false front teeth of their middle-aged
lovers as tokens of intense love.67 The change that makes talking about bodies
acceptable is the move away from respectable modesty and the repression of sexu-
ality and this is a move away from both middle-class and working-class traditions.
Dunn’s novel reveals a different approach to interiority: an identification of the
self as the source of the problems and as an object to be worked upon by the char-
acter. This is a shift away from the baffled confusion of characters who do not
know what they feel in novels of the early 1960s. In Dunn’s novel bodies are not
perfect objects, not machines or toys, but expressive of feeling and being. Toys,
as the married man’s belt might now be described, are revealed to force feeling
without creating change. Lesbianism as a solution to the problems of
heterosexuality was the subject of fierce debate in the 1970s but sexual identity,
that is the categorising of a person according to the object of their desire, seems
curiously irrelevant to this novel. Engaging with bodies is of far more immediate
concern for the characters. Placed in the context of these novels as a vision of pos-
sibilities for women at this time, it is apparent that while Jeanette was able to fall in
love with Queenie, altering the gender of Jeanette’s lover did not shift the latter’s
emotional repression.
Dunn was the only author to attempt an exploration of the emotions involved
in the desire for erotic violence. Female acceptance of eroticised pain raised fun-
damental questions about female sexuality. Andrea Newman, whose work encom-
passed the widest range of female sexual behaviour, was also the novelist who most
fully allowed her characters to express a connection between assertive female sexu-
ality and masochistic desires. In the sample of novels, the female characters who
are erotically aroused by violence often treat their own response as surprising
and unexpected. In a novel by Elaine Feinstein, Emily ‘was entirely astonished
when he struck her ... he said softly: You shouldn’t bait me, Emily ... But to her
horror, she felt her body melt erotically in her very fear of him’.68 In such
scenes, the consent of the woman who was being hit was unasked for, and more
than irrelevant; the fear was part of the arousal. The central character in Edna
O’Brien’s August is a Wicked Month (1965) says, ‘how unfortunate that she
could not have love affairs with someone for whom she had affection. Fear and
hatred were what motivated her passions’.69 Domestic violence of the non-
sexual variety also began to appear. In The Realms of Gold (1974), Drabble’s
female narrator persistently referred to the central male character as a good
man though he repeatedly beats his wife; she was, after all, provoking him.70
In her 1974 novel, Dunn presented female masochism as the psychic outcome of
a repressive and inequitable society. Young British women’s confidence in explor-
ing and talking about their sexuality was growing in the early 1970s. Among fem-
inists, Spare Rib magazine, founded in 1972, initially produced articles intended to
support women in demanding what they wanted sexually from men.71 The fem-
inist Anna Coote said in 1974:
The women’s movement did not object to . . . the sight of couples copulating,
providing this did not reinforce an image of women as existing solely to serve
the sexual gratification of men [and that] her opposition as a feminist to censor-
ship laws was on the basis that, like most laws, they are drafted, passed and
administered by men.72
This stance involved rejection of the notion that naked women are inherently vul-
nerable and that such images can only be defined in relation to the male gaze.
There was space at this point for positive, perhaps even utopian, visions of sexu-
ality, that were later caricatured as presenting sex as ideally an invariably egalitar-
ian activity in which participants were always clear about what they wanted, and
what they wanted always related to desirable modes of behaviour in the rest of
their lives.73 The presence of masochistic desire in female-authored novels high-
lights the difficulty of explaining female (or male) sexual desire in idealised
950 H. Cook
terms. Sue O’Sullivan and Susan Ardill have, however, argued that rather than the
caricatured utopianism, among those involved in the British women’s movement
the difficulty was that ‘No one spoke directly about sex; there was no ongoing dis-
cussion about desire or sexuality’.74 This suggests the courage of female novelists
who were writing about sexuality and the innovative nature of their work within
British culture.
From Carter’s first novel published in 1966, her work was notable for explicit
descriptions of sexuality and violence. Her account of female sexuality in The
Sadeian Woman stands out because of her brilliant and original use of pornogra-
phy. This produces two results relevant to this analysis. Sade’s pornographic vio-
lence enabled Carter to produce emotional intensity while positioning herself
outside the dynamic of victim and oppressor. Literary scholar Isobel Armstrong
commented that ‘for Carter ... lyricised feminine mourning and melancholy is
precisely the trap, the fix, which women have to get out of at all costs’.75 It is
easy to agree with, and admire, this rejection of misery, though in this Carter
was at one with the dominant culture, which condemned and despised intense
emotionalism, labelling it sentimental, self-indulgent and even hysterical.
Carter’s much admired reliance on non-realist literary modes provided a means
of engaging with these same erotic psychic structures without herself having to
expose emotional distress.76 Sage commented that Carter ‘feared and loathed
and found hilarious the spectacle of the suffering woman, and her cruelty was a
measure of her fear’.77 Pornography also requires the exposure of sexualised
bodies. Carter’s use of pornography in her analysis was a means of both openly
conveying the emotional violence done to women and a forceful rejection of
modes of expression shaped by internalised female sexual repression. The
limited portrayal of bodies in women’s novels suggests why this had so powerful
an impact.
By 1979, when The Sadeian Woman was published, feminist attitudes were
polarised. Concerns about domestic violence, rape and child sexual assault were
rising in the 1960s, and, in the 1970s, feminist theorists connected this abuse
with the subjection of women (as had first-wave feminists). These concerns
gave authority to a desexualised, disembodied vision of female sexuality that
was put forward with increasing force and prescriptiveness from the mid-1970s.
This integrated Justine’s beliefs about modesty, and her fearful response to
sexual desire, with a new assertiveness about the reality of female suffering at
the hands of abusive men. Around 1980, Californian lesbian feminists introduced
sadomasochism as a fluid, alternative sexual practice with the potential through
dominant/submissive ‘games’ to express highly eroticised child/adult, carer/
cared for feelings of needing to be passive at times and aggressive at times.78
Later in the 1980s, there was a conflation of S&M practice with notions of
butch and femme relationships, within which individuals were easily seen as
fixed, albeit not by biological sex, within gender stereotypes of hard men who
cannot express emotion and seductive, emotionally manipulative women.
The outlines of Justine and Juliette can be clearly discerned within these
polarised positions. Nonetheless, those involved were attempting to articulate
their own sexual desires and to present the implications for female sexual activity;
and these arguments still shape debates about female sexuality today. Literary
scholar Robin Sheets shows that Carter rejected both arguments in support of
sadomasochistic practices made during the 1980s and the claims made by the
anti-pornography movement that feminists should not be erotically aroused by
physical manifestations of dominance or submission.79 According to Sheets,
Carter shows in her fiction that the latter position ignores the political and cultural
context of inequality and power within which female (and male) sexuality is
constructed.
The rejection of both the existing psychic structure of female sexual desire, and
of support for sadomasochism as an alternative, is evident in Carter’s discussion of
the mechanics of power in Sadeian sexual encounters. In the following quotation,
she begins with a line from Sade:

‘Now victim for a moment, my lovely angel, soon you’ll persecute me in turn.’
These violent transformations ... are the only ways in which Sade can envisage
reciprocity ... the cock, the phallus ... which is not a state-in-itself . . . but a
modality . . . passed from man to woman, man to man, woman to woman,
back and forth, as in a parlour game. We must not confuse these parlour
games with those kind of real relations that change you.80
Power cannot be undermined simply by changing the hands that hold it.
Carter, thus, establishes a difference between ‘real relations that change you’
and sexuality reduced to mechanical bodies and acts (again reminiscent of
Cosmopolitan):
Sexual activity in these Sadeian communities of equals is a social exploit, a com-
munal activity, an infertility festival, with a choric quality. ... it is the most com-
plicated mechanics that must set the erotic engine in motion, mouth against
cunt, cock in anus, tongue on testicles, finger on clitoris ... in the regimented
pursuit of pleasure.81
This is the equality of Juliette and her friends. Carter’s alternative involves depth of
feeling and exchange and is already implicit in her criticism of Sade’s ‘parlour
games’:
The presence of his accomplices preserves his ego from the singular confronta-
tion with the object of a reciprocal desire which is, in itself, both passive object
and active subject. Such a partner acts on us as we act on it; both partners are
changed by the exchange and, if submission is mutual, then aggression is
mutual.82
Carter is claiming that ‘real relations’ involve partners who are both needy and
desirous, both taking and giving, and thus both at once vulnerable and powerful.
This position is not idealised as it acknowledges ambivalent and contradictory
desires on the basis that these vulnerabilities are fluid and shared by both partners.
It does not, however, contain a solution to the inequality created by the cultural
construction of women and men with differing emotional needs and material
resources. As with the (mythical) pro-sex, feminist utopianism of the 1970s,
952 H. Cook
Carter would set us down outside existing sexual and economic structures
without, however, laying out a path to get there.
Conclusion
This article has examined the paper trail of fantasies and dreams created by
popular women’s fiction from 1960 to 1975. Carter’s Sadeian archetypes reveal
the clusters of associated values that give shape to the female characters in these
novels. Justine is virtuous and modest, self-sacrificing and sensitive; her heart
guides her decisions. Loyal and faithful, she is also passive, deferential and sub-
missive to authority: men, parents, society. They act, she obeys in order to
please and represses her feelings of anger and violence. Striving to be nice, she
is also incompetent and whining, gullible and unwilling to take control of her
life. For Juliette life is a competition and she plays to win. Highly sexually
active, she is embarrassed by love; she values her female friends—as allies. She
is also stoical and unafraid of violence or expressing anger; she causes suffering
but rarely suffers. Hard and bright, meretricious and funny, Carter commented
that Juliette’s image gave rise to the prospect of ‘a boardroom full of glamorous
and sexy lady executives’.83
Many of the novelists writing in this period have said publicly that they drew
upon their own experience. Where available, their autobiographies, interviews
and biographies confirm this.84 Women did experience their desire as passive
and responsive to men, and the route away from this subjectivity was a rejection
of the values held dear by nice, likeable, virtuous women. Yet, Carter’s comment
that ‘Juliette has notably fewer spiritual great-granddaughters than her sister in
the imaginary brothel where ideas of women are sold’ still appears to be
correct.85 Women still prefer to be loving and sensitive and want to be liked;
though there are many high-profile exceptions, most of the time for most
women, that still means being deferential, modest and submissive. Both Justine
and Juliette fit easily within our increasingly inequitable culture in which compe-
tition and the market dominate, and one is a winner or, most often, a loser and
deferential subordinate. ‘Boardrooms full of . . . lady executives’ are still reserved
for fiction.
Carter did not approve of the novels discussed in this article: ‘After reading a
contemporary’s meticulously realistic work, she roared: “There must be more to
life than this.” . . . Taxed with overwriting, [she] (“I’m all for pretension”)
explained how eagerly she looked for opportunities to do so’.86 Yet, despite the
despised realism, these personally revelatory, emotionally intense novels did
offer their readers alternative visions of femininity. They transgressed against a
culture in which women (and men) did not discuss their intimate emotional
and sexual lives in public and often not in private either. Carter suggested that
‘in the looking-glass of Sade’s misanthropy, women may see themselves as they
have been and it is an uncomfortable sight’.87 Women’s novels were a looking
glass they themselves created, and for large numbers of female readers, it was an
arresting sight.88 The 1960s saw a gradual rise to consciousness of the fact that
what was happening in women’s personal lives was not merely personal and began
undermining sexual and emotional repressiveness and deference. Though Justine
and Juliette continue to shape femininity and feminism today, these novels con-
tributed to revealing the social relations of power, thereby helping to enable the
unexpected, extraordinary rebirth of activist, rebellious feminism that began a
new reshaping of women’s place in western society from around 1970 and
which still continues today.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Pat Thane, Chris Hilliard, Marybeth Hamilton, Jeska Rees,
the anonymous readers for the Women’s History Review and all the friends who
were enthusiastic readers of these novels.
Notes
[1] The first biography was Lorna Sage’s (1994, 2007) Angela Carter (Plymouth: North-
cote House in association with the British Council). Sarah Gamble’s biography has
few new sources; rather it reflects the shift in approaches to literary criticism: (2006)
Angela Carter: a literary life (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Susannah Clapp
(2012) A Card from Angela Carter (London: Bloomsbury) is a personal memoir of
friendship.
[2] Angela Carter (1979) The Sadeian woman: an exercise in cultural history (London:
Virago), p. 36.
[3] Carter cites (1966 – 67) The Ouvres completes, 16 vols (Paris: Cercle du livre Pre-
cieux), and the following translations: (1965) The Complete Justine: philosophy in
the bedroom and other writings, trans. R. Seaver & A. Wainhouse (New York:
Grove Press); (1968) Juliette (New York: Grove Press).
[4] Hera Cook (2004) The Long Sexual Revolution: English women, sex and contraception,
1800 – 1975 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 271 – 317. Hera Cook (2005) The
English Sexual Revolution: technology and social change, History Workshop Journal,
59, pp. 109– 128.
[5] Cook, Long Sexual Revolution, pp. 218– 219.
[6] Gamble, Angela Carter, p. 134.
[7] Carter, Sadeian Woman, p. 36.
[8] For the debates, see C. Vance (Ed.) (1984) Pleasure and Danger: exploring female
sexuality (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul).
[9] Andrea Dworkin (1981) Pornography: men possessing women (London: The Women’s
Press), pp. 84 – 85. Susanne Kappeler (1986) The Pornography of Representation
(London: Polity Press), pp. 133– 136. See also Avis Lewallen (1988) Wayward
Girls but Wicked Women? Female Sexuality in Angela Carter’s The Bloody
Chamber, in Gary Day & Clive Bloom (Eds) Perspectives on Pornography: sexuality
in film and literature (Basingstoke: Macmillan), p. 146.
[10] There is an introduction to the substantial critical literature relating The Sadeian
Woman to Carter’s fiction in Sarah Gamble (Ed.) (2001) The Fiction of Angela
Carter: a reader’s guide to essential criticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan),
pp. 110 – 134. Several articles relate Carter’s work to her society, albeit briefly, in
Lorna Sage (Ed.) (1994) Flesh and the Mirror: essays on the art of Angela Carter
(London: Virago), as does Robin Ann Sheets (1991) Pornography, Fairy Tales,
954 H. Cook
and Feminism: Angela Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’ Journal of the History of Sexu-
ality, 1, pp. 633– 657.
[11] Carter, Sadeian Woman, p. 56. See also her comments on fine art, p. 13.
[12] Sage, Angela Carter, p. 32.
[13] Ibid., p. 32.
[14] Frank Mort (2004) Fantasies of Metropolitan Life: planning London in the 1940s,
Journal of British Studies, 43, p. 124.
[15] Frank Mort (1999) Social and Symbolic Fathers and Sons in Postwar Britain, Journal
of British Studies, 38, p. 374.
[16] For a list of the novels and an extended discussion of the content, see Hera Cook
(1999) The Long Sexual Revolution: British women, sex and contraception in the twen-
tieth century (D.Phil. thesis, University of Sussex), pp. 284– 309. No contemporary
lists were found and it is unlikely that I discovered all novelists who met the criteria.
[17] This is based on the father’s occupation, as garnered from interviews, memoirs and
biographies. The category of ‘working class’ is wide, and includes some women with
one parent who was ‘submerged middle class’; for this concept, see Brian Jackson &
Denis Marsden (1963) Education and the Working Class (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul), p. 56.
[18] See Cook, Long Sexual Revolution, p. 318. For a list of the novelists arranged into
generations, see Cook, Long Sexual Revolution (D.Phil.), p. 362.
[19] See Cook, Long Sexual Revolution, pp. 292– 295.
[20] Hera Cook (2000) ‘Unseemly and Unwomanly Behaviour’: comparing women’s
control of their fertility in Britain and Australia, Journal of Population Research (Aus-
tralia), 17, pp. 125– 141. Cook, Long Sexual Revolution, p. 185; Fn. 60, p. 205. Sue
O’Sullivan & Susan Ardill (2005) Upsetting an Applecart: difference, desire and
lesbian sadomasochism, Feminist Review, 80, p. 109.
[21] Lynne Reid Banks (1962) An End to Running (London: Chatto & Windus). Elizabeth
Jane Howard (1965) After Julius (London: Jonathon Cape).
[22] Gillian Freeman (1955) The Liberty Man (London: Longmans Green).
[23] E.g. Lynne Reid Banks (1960) The L-shaped Room (London: Chatto & Windus);
Brigid Brophy (1962) Flesh (London: Secker & Warburg); Elizabeth Berridge
(1961) Rose under Glass (London: William Heinemann); Patricia Robins (1961)
Lady Chatterley’s Daughter (London: World Distributors); Andrea Newman
(1964) A Share of the World (London: Bodley Head); Iris Murdoch (1964) The
Italian Girl (London: Chatto & Windus). Edna O’Brien was first to describe cunni-
lingus and fellatio in (1968) The Love Object (London: Jonathon Cape). Doris
Lessing (1962) The Golden Notebook (London: Michael Joseph) provides the most
explicit discussion of the sexual experience of a woman of her generation in the
sample, but Lessing was shaped by her upbringing in Africa, which she did not
leave until she was aged thirty. Many of the characters in the novel are also outsiders
living within British society.
[24] E.g. non-consensual sex: Reid Banks, An End to Running; Margaret Drabble (1964)
The Garrick Year (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson); Howard, After Julius; Edna
O’Brien (1964) Girls in their Married Bliss (London, Jonathon Cape). Eroticised
sexual violence: Andrea Newman (1968) Alex (London: Triton); (1969) A Bouquet
of Barbed Wire (London: Triton); (1966) The Cage (London: Anthony Blond);
Nell Dunn (1974) Tear His Head Off His Shoulders (London: Jonathon Cape);
M. Taylor (1970) The Nymphet (London: New English Library).
[25] E.g. Sarah Gainham [Rachel Ames] (1970) Take-over Bid (London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson).
[26] For an exception, see Elizabeth Jane Howard (1972) Odd Girl Out (London: Jona-
thon Cape). For a fuller discussion of lesbian presence in the sample, see Cook,
Long Sexual Revolution (D.Phil).

[28] Note fucked is the language used by Carter. Ibid., pp. 47 – 48.
[29] Andrea Newman (1965) Mirage (London: Bodley Head).
[31] See also Penelope Mortimer (1962) The Pumpkin Eater (London: Hutchinson).
[33] Ibid., p. 54.
[34] Lessing, The Golden Notebook, is innovative in this respect also. Ella has been having
an affair with Paul for five years. She goes to his home for the first time and expresses
a mild concern for his wife. p. 225.
[36] Penelope Mortimer, (1967) My Friend Says its Bullet Proof (London: Hutchinson);
Andrea Newman (1967) Three into Two Won’t Go (London: Triton); Fay Weldon
(1967) The Fat Woman’s Joke (London: MacGibbon & Kee).
[37] Bernice Rubens (1973) Go Tell the Lemming (London: Jonathon Cape).
[38] E.g. The Guardian (22 April, 1970). Bainbridge, Drabble and Lessing also explicitly
rejected identification as feminists.
[40] E.g. Weldon, Fat Woman’s Joke. Jackie Collins (1969 reprint) The World Is Full of
Married Men (London: NEL; first published 1968 by W. H. Allen).
[41] Carter, Sadeian Woman, p. 101. For untidy housekeeping, see, for example, Margaret
Drabble (1972) The Needle’s Eye (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson); Howard, Odd
Girl Out.
[42] Collins, Married Men, p. 23.
[43] Ibid., pp. 88 –89.
[44] Where available their autobiographies, interviews and biographies confirm this, e.g.
Elizabeth Jane Howard (2002) Slipstream (London: Macmillan); Penelope Mortimer
(1993) About Time Too, 1940 – 1978 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson), p. 71; Edna
O’Brien in Nell Dunn (1965) Talking to Women (London: MacGibbon & Kee), p. 75;
Pamela Hansford Johnson (1975) Important to Me. Personalia (London: Macmillan);
Maureen Duffy (1983 reprint) That’s How it Was, introduction reprint (London:
Virago; first published 1962 by New Authors Limited, Hutchinson); Doris Lessing
(1995) Under my Skin: volume one of my autobiography, to 1949 (New York:
Harper Collins); Molly Parkin (1993) Moll: the making of Molly Parkin (London:
Victor Gollancz); Muriel Spark (1992) Curriculum Vitae (London: Constable).
Others who have said this was the case include Beryl Bainbridge and Fay Weldon;
see entries in Jay L. Halio (Ed.) (1983) Dictionary of Literary Biography: British nove-
lists since 1960, Part 1: A– G (New York: Gale Research).
[45] The Guardian (26 September, 1969).
[46] Ibid.
[47] The Guardian (18 May, 1974).
[48] E.g. Lee Everett Alkin (1987) Kinds of Loving (London: Columbus Books); Diana
Dors (1981) Dors by Diana (London: Queen Anne Press); Christine Keeler &
S. Fawkes (1983) Nothing but ...Christine Keeler (London: New English Library).
[49] Margaret Forster (1965) Georgy Girl (London: Secker & Warburg).
[50] Carter, Sadeian Woman, pp. 82, 83.
[51] Ibid., p. 79.
[52] Ibid., p. 79.
[53] Ibid., pp. 128– 129.
[54] E.g. Pamela Hansford Johnson (1972) The Holiday Friend (London: Macmillan);
Gainham, Take-over Bid.
956 H. Cook
[55] E.g. Nina Bawden (1974) George beneath a Paper Moon (London: Allen Lane);
Howard, Odd Girl Out; P. Hansford Johnson (1970) The Honours Board (London:
Macmillan).
[56] Molly Parkin (1974) Love All (London: Blond & Briggs).
[57] E.g. Penelope Mortimer (1971) Home (London: Hutchinson).
[58] Molly Parkin, Moll.
[59] Ibid., p. 187.
[60] Mortimer About Time Too, p. 205.
[62] Ibid., pp. 48 –49.
[63] Dunn, Tear His Head, p. 93.
[64] Ibid., p. 89.
[65] Fay Weldon (1973 reprint) Down among the Women (London: Penguin; first pub-
lished 1971 by William Heinemann), p. 44
[66] Dunn, Tear His Head, pp. 13, 33, 115. Beryl Bainbridge (1975 reprint) The Bottle
Factory Outing (London: Fontana; first published 1974 by Gerald Duckworth), p. 24.
[67] Parkin, Love; Drabble, Realms of Gold.
[68] Elaine Feinstein (reprint 1974) The Amberstone Exit (London: Penguin; first pub-
lished 1972 by Hutchinson), p. 88.
[69] Edna O’Brien (1967) August is a Wicked Month (London: Jonathon Cape), p. 32. See
also Andrea Newman (1976 reprint) Alexa (London: Triton: first published 1968
Penguin), pp. 134– 135.
[70] Drabble, Realms of Gold. See also Drabble, Needle’s Eye; Taylor, The Nymphet;
Bawden, George beneath a Paper Moon.
[71] O’Sullivan & Ardill, ‘Upsetting’, p. 105.
[72] The Guardian (20 November 1974). Commenting on a Time Out debate held earlier
that year.
[73] To the extent that such a vision existed, it was projected onto lesbian relationships by
both lesbian and heterosexual women, and most clearly articulated in the idealised
erotica imagined by the anti-pornography movement from the late 1970s.
[74] O’Sullivan & Ardill, ‘Upsetting’, p. 104.
[75] Isobel Armstrong (1994) Woolf by the Lake Woolf at the Circus, in Sage (Ed.) Essays,
p. 257.
[76] Postmodern literary criticism bypasses such issues, e.g. Gamble, Angela Carter,
pp. 9– 11 and passim.
[77] Sage, Angela Carter, pp. 32 – 33.
[78] See Susan O’Sullivan (1999) What a Difference a Decade Makes: coming to power
and the second coming, Feminist Review, 61, p. 114. These issues were important
in UK lesbian culture but feminist debate on these issues began in the more open
sexual culture of the USA. See Amber Hollibaugh & Cherie Moraga (1983) What
We’re Rolling around in Bed With: sexual silences in feminism, in Ann Snitow,
Christine Stansell & Sharon Thompson (Eds) Powers of Desire: the politics of sexuality
(New York: Monthly Review Press), pp. 404 – 414.
[79] Sheets, Pornography, Fairy Tales, and Feminism, p. 656.
[80] Ibid., p. 145.
[81] Ibid., p. 145.
[82] Ibid., p. 146.
[83] Ibid., p.102.
[84] See fn. 44.
[86] Clapp, A Card from Angela Carter, p. 59.
[87] Ibid., p. 36.
[88] E.g. Ruth Inglis (1965) Those Literary Furies, Nova, pp. 56 – 61.
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Article in Women s History Review · November 2014

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Women's History Review

Angela Carter's ‘The Sadeian Woman’

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To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2014.906840

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Angela Carter’s ‘The Sadeian Woman’

# 2014 Taylor & Francis

Justine and Adultery

deserted wife left with children, financially humiliated by husband—and

Paradoxically, Justine’s only triumph is her refusal to treat herself as a thing,

acknowledgement of the injuries inflicted by class prevents Queenie’s life appear-

she begins with a line from Sade:

were enthusiastic readers of these novels.

[27] Carter, Sadeian Woman, p. 55.

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