The Bloody Chamber
A seventeen-year-old pianist marries a marquis three times her age and rides the night train to his castle on a Breton tidal island, where he fastens at her throat a choker of rubies like a slit made by a knife and leaves her alone with a library of illustrated books she is too young to have been shown. Called away to New York the morning after the wedding night, he hands her the whole ring of keys and forbids exactly one of them; a blind piano tuner is somewhere in the house, and her widowed mother, who as a girl shot a man-eating tiger, is at the far end of a telephone line. Angela Carter, who had translated Perrault two years earlier, opened her collection with this and set the terms for the fairy tale rewriting that followed for two decades.
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Lineage
- reworks ↑ Tales of Mother Goose
- reworks ↑ Beauty and the Beast
Attributes
Closest analogues
- 63% · 13 shared
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- 46% · 9 shared
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