Angela Carter is still (despite an early death in 1992, at the age of 52) one of the British writers most actively involved in the reconsideration of authorship and of traditional cultural codes and discourses, as one of the most prominent authors of "writerly texts", to use Barthes's phrase. Paradoxically, she is a very strong figure, very much alive, of the age that Barthes blesses with another famous phrase, "of the death of the author". She is also the most prominent female author in Britain not to have received, or not having been short-listed for, the prestigious Booker Prize, probably as a result of a certain prevailing masculinist bias in the critical circles of the age.
In his 1968 essay, Barthes invites readers to engage with writerly texts and be instrumental in the production of a plurality of meanings; the undecidability of writing is a fundamental dimension of narration, not a weakness: "several codes and several voices are there, without priority. Writing is precisely this loss of origin, this loss of 'motives' to the profit of a volume of indeterminations or over-determinations". Writing may be seen as a loss of origin for Angela Carter, but her work may equally be considered a challenge, and her readers, women and men, are invited to see what they are tempted to take for granted, even their gender, as artificial, social constructions, sometimes seen as ideological structures assuming the shape of cultural myths that need demythologising. Barthes's idea of several voices and codes working in texts applies to the challenging intertextual dimension of Carter's fiction, also acknowledged by Jago Morrison, who thinks that her texts are "constantly engaged in the quotation, appropriation and subversion of other texts. As well as folk and fairytale sources, her work engages with a wide range of other texts and references".
