I would really like to have had the guts and the energy and so on to be able to write about people having battles with DHSS. But I haven't … I'm an arty person. Okay, I write overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose. So what… Alienated is the only way to be, after all. Since 1990, Angela Carter’s reputation, as writer and thinker, has soared, to the point where her collection of folk and fairy tales for the modern age, The Bloody Chamber , is now a GCSE set text in England, and is taught on most university-level literature courses. There are MA programmes entirely devoted to her writings. Her complete works have been printed and reprinted over the last quarter-century, and films, The Company of Wolves , The Magic Toyshop ; and plays, such as Nights at the Circus (Kneehigh), have been derived from them. Her influence on ‘the contemporary Gothic’ is both wide-ranging and profound.