The collection
The ten stories
Carter’s book takes ten familiar tales and remakes them. Each story now has a full guide: what it reworks, how Carter’s methods do their work, a table of short verified quotations, and a route into the coursework comparison with your post-2000 novel. Read the story in your own copy first, then work through its page. The stories are listed in the order they appear in the collection.
The Bloody Chamber
Reworks the tale of Bluebeard: a young bride, an older husband and a forbidden room.
Story 02The Courtship of Mr Lyon
Reworks Beauty and the Beast: a father’s debt and a daughter given over to a beast who waits.
Story 03The Tiger’s Bride
A second reworking of Beauty and the Beast, told from the daughter’s side after a wager is lost.
Story 04Puss-in-Boots
Reworks the Puss in Boots tale as bawdy comedy, with a scheming cat and a guarded wife.
Story 05The Erl-King
Draws on the woodland-spirit tradition: a walker in an autumn forest and a figure who keeps caged birds.
Story 06The Snow Child
A short, stark folk fragment in which a count wishes a girl into being on a winter road.
Story 07The Lady of the House of Love
Crosses Sleeping Beauty with the vampire tale: a young officer and the last heiress of a decaying house.
Story 08The Werewolf
A spare reworking of Little Red Riding Hood in a cold country, with a wolf met on the path.
Story 09The Company of Wolves
A fuller reworking of Little Red Riding Hood: a girl, a hunter and the winter forest.
Story 10Wolf-Alice
Draws on the feral-child story and the Red Riding Hood world as a child comes to a sense of herself.
Reading a Carter story
The habit that turns a good answer into a strong one is moving from device to effect. Naming a device is labelling, not analysis; the mark comes from what the device does. So when you spot a method, whether it is Carter’s flat, laconic syntax, a controlling metaphor, a shift of narrative voice or a loaded image, do not stop at the label. Ask what it makes the reader feel or understand, and turn that into an arguable claim about the story’s concerns: desire, power, the gaze, transformation, or the price of survival. Each story page models this in its ‘A closer look’ sections and its quotation table, where every row runs quotation, then method, then why it matters.
It also pays to read the last three stories together. ‘The Werewolf’, ‘The Company of Wolves’ and ‘Wolf-Alice’ form a wolf trilogy, three reworkings of Little Red Riding Hood that answer one another: the first strips the tale down to cold survival, the second floods it with female desire and choice, and the third abandons predation altogether for tenderness and self-knowledge. Set side by side, they show Carter arguing with her own material, and a comparison that tracks how one writer reworks a single source three ways is exactly the kind of method-led point that rewards you in the coursework.