After a performance on the cinema organ (not by him), Christopher Frayling gave a talk about his friendship with Angela Carter in Bath in the early 1970s. They shared a common interest in Gothic fiction. Chris had done a Ph.D at Cambridge on Jean-Jacques Rousseau and was writing a book on vampyres. Angela Carter was a young writer, writing the stories which became The Bloody Chamber. They tried to persuade Bath City Council to erect a plaque to the fact that Mary Shelley finished Frankenstein in Bath and used to go to Bristol together to watch early Hollywood horror movies. She recorded their conversation in a notebook. The question everyone wanted to ask was if they had an affair. We thought not, only because the character in The Lady in the House of Love who is quite obviously based on Christopher and travels to Romania in search of Bram Stoker is described as young and innocent.
What a wonderful writer she was ! Thank you for keeping her memory alive. NIGHTS AT THE OPERA and WISE CHILDREN were two of the finest novels of the late 1980s. And she was a passionate, and devoted, supporter of the Labour Party !