Greydoll Reads The Women: Angela Carter and Colette

Sleepless nights a month or so back caused me to experiment with short stories as bedtime reading choice. Then too,  I fancied a break from gritty crime and instead to enjoy the company of ... not wolves as such but women.

Spurred on by listening to extracts from a biography of Angela Carter on the radio (The Invention of Angela Carter by Edmund Gordon) I raided my bookshelves and found a copy of her collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories - re-imagined and retold fairy tales including Bluebeard, Red Riding Hood, Beauty and the Beast and Puss in Boots amongst others. Each is a detailed tale spun from imagination, blood, eroticism, love and identity.  Angela Carter was a writer who loved language so much that her pages spangle and glitter with the relish of it and may not be to your taste if your relish is not equal to Carter's. Verdict: dark and toothy myths from female experience and imagination, rich enough for reading again and again. And if that ain't part of the definition of legend then I don't know what is.

But after this powerful dip into alternatives, I opted for another old favourite from my bookshelf - the French writer  Colette with The Rainy Moon, And Other Stories.
This is a collection filled with Colette's sharp observation and description in which, in the main, Colette casts herself as witness to and narrator of stories of love, obsession and relationship all set during the first half of the twentieth century. Her sharp but cool eye is as much a delight as her writing (in this edition translated from the French by Antonia White) and each of these short stories left me with something to think about.

Happy International Women's Day....

...for I am of that age and generation of women who do remember having to have our consciousness raised.
Well.... I did not have to... as such... but as I recalled things what made me feel gloomy and stuck... I found that attending workshops and reading certain magazines and books do help me move my depression into plain old satisfying stroppiness.
Magazines such as Spare Rib and Women's Review (about which I can find nothing on Google except ebay ads!... and I do still have some issues lying around because I am that kind of girl.)
The workshops invariable involved sitting in circles, celebrating the moon and spelling WOMEN in as many interesting ways as possible...Womin, Wombin, Wymin, Womyn... you name it, bless us, anything to reinvent. Sorry. That's a patronising thing to say (wash my mouth out with soap). It is understandable. It is valuable. Some of this stuff was like water to a woman dying of thirst.
I mean, you try sitting in a student seminar while some idiot male fellow student tells you that you should not be here... being educated... cos there be no point... cos you is only capable of having babies and looking after babies and MEN (what be big babies).
In my case, being a nicely brought up, polite girl, I didn't say anything. Nor did I say anything when a table full of lechers... sorry "lecturers"... do tell me that I am really "quite intelligent". No dear, I smiled on... until I fell down, struck all of a heap. And after some time I did have my consciousness raised and got very, very, angry... as did a lot of other ladies.
One time... in the 1980s, The Old Man do recall, ... he went into a Women's Bookshop to buy me a present and got told that this was not the place for him! He be wounded by this.

A lot of people get angry about discovering who they are... or who they think they are. It happens now... as lost young people find their "identity" and their "anger" and "who is to blame for it all".

Anyway.... for those of you who are women... or would like to be... may I wish us a very happy day... all of our own.