The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

Two of the ten stories in the collection are Beauty and the Beast, rewritten twice over and deliberately given opposite endings. The Courtship of Mr Lyon keeps Beaumont's resolution, in which the Beast becomes a man; The Tiger's Bride refuses it, and the girl sheds her own skin to become an animal instead. Carter translated Perrault and worked on fairy tales all her life, and the method of the book is to take a known tale and ask what its bargain actually is. Beaumont's version is a lesson about looking past appearances and about a daughter's duty to her father; Carter reads the same plot as a transaction in which a woman is handed over to settle a man's debt, which is what the original says if you do not soften it.

Angela Carter translated Perrault's tales in 1977 and rewrote them in The Bloody Chamber two years later. The title story is Bluebeard, Puss-in-Boots gets his own story, and the wolf stories answer Little Red Riding Hood.

Three of the collection's stories rework Little Red Riding Hood, which the Grimms printed as Rotkappchen and which is the version with the huntsman and the rescue. Carter takes the tale apart across The Werewolf, The Company of Wolves and Wolf-Alice, and removes the rescue every time: the girl deals with the wolf herself, or joins him. The Grimms had already softened a bloodier oral tale into a warning for children, and Carter's move is to put back what the softening removed, which is why the debt is to this printed version specifically rather than to folklore in general.