With Wise Children, the last novel written before her untimely death, Angela Carter used her final book to create a world of a generational saga filled with dramatic reveals of paternity, incestuous relationships, and illegitimacy, yet still with Carter’s classic style of playful language and Carnivalesque themes.

‘A mother is always a mother, since a mother is a biological fact, whilst a father is a movable feast.’

Carter set herself a challenge when writing Wise Children, incorporating every Shakespeare play known to man in the most intertwining and unique fashion, and that she did! Everything from Hamlet to Titus Andronicus; you can spot these moments if you know your Shakespeare.

‘Grandma said it then, she said it again in 1939: ‘Every twenty years, it’s bound to happen. It’s to do with generations. The old men get so they can’t stand the competition and they kill of all the young men they can lay their hands on.’

Wise Children is Carter’s only first-person perspective novel, told through seventy-fiveyear-old Dora Chance. When Dora is introduced to us, she tells us that it is April 23rd, commonly accepted as the birthday of William Shakespeare, also her father's and his twin brother's birthday, and her own birthday, as well as her twin sister’s birthday, Nora Chance.

‘Seventy-five, today, and a topsy-turvy day of wind and sunshine. The kind of wind that gets into the blood and drives you wild. Wild! And I give a little shiver because suddenly I know, I know it in my ancient water, that something will happen today. Something exciting. Something nice, something nasty, I don’t give a monkey’s. Just as long as something happens to remind us we’re still in the land of the living.’

With her Dora, Carter bestows one of the most unique voices in postmodernist literature; when reading novels narrated by women of similar ages to Dora Chance, they are often more reserved and delicate, as though they had never been young and reckless in their lives; they were born and die at 75-years-old. Dora challenged the mould - explicit, vulgar, sexual, witty, and bawdy. When she greets you on the first page, taking you by the hand and flashing a cheeky grin at you, you can feel that she has lived; more than that, she loves her life with a blazing display of bravura.

The Chance Sisters are the black sheep of their family for the reason that they are illegitimate – their mother, Pretty Kitty, was a chambermaid, and their father, Melchior Hazard, the eventually well-renowned Shakespearean actor, spent a single night together when Melchior rented a room at the house she worked at. He was gone before she knew her period wasn’t coming – nine months later, the lovely twins, Dora and Nora, took their first breath. At that same moment, Pretty Kitty took her last, leaving the Chance Sisters to be raised by Pretty Kitty’s employer, a woman only known as Grandma Chance.

Melchior never recognises the girls as his own and refuses to supply money to support them, which is where Peregrine Hazard comes into the picture; the twin of Melchior and the Chance Sister’s Uncle, a man who goes wherever the wind takes him and makes his money through passes fads, whether that be magic, producing, espionage or oil. Perry is undoubtedly close to the Chance sisters, particularly Dora, who legally allows himself to be classed as their father and supplies them with money, gifts, and whatever they please, including dance lessons.

‘Comedy is Tragedy that happens to other people.’

When pitching what is undeniably her most ambitious novel, she described it to Carmen Callil, Founder of Virago and Carter’s publisher, as ‘a long comic panoramic novel’ which ‘uses the theatre as a metaphor for British society over the last 100 odd years; it’s subtext, evidently, is the general inefficiency of patriarchy’, which, when taken to those above Callil, were ‘not in love with it’ but published it anyway.

The main focus, however, in all aspects we are privy to being shown in the novel is their relationship with their father, Melchior, who is married thrice and the father of six children and knows none of them. It is almost Homeric in its approach to Father-Child relationships. The title is taken from The Odyssey, spoken by Telemachus, son of Penelope and Odysseus; ‘It’s a wise child who knows it’s own father’ - a line parodied by Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice in reverse sentiment.

Many a child has struggled to make sense of their father; physically or spiritually, present or absent - in Wise Children, Carter takes this childhood anxiety and applies the extra complexity of Father-Daughter Relationships. The Hazard Men, particularly those who undertake fatherhood, tend to make the women in their lives take the brunt of their emotions - any sense of failure their experience must be reassured by a woman, a wife or a daughter, a lover, or any woman he encounters. Their speech is sodden with demands for reassurance. Whether they are aware they are doing this is the debate.

For The Chances, this is made even more challenging by the fact that, despite everything Melchior tries to rid himself of the bastardised daughters in favour of his legitimate ones, they are still present in each other's lives; more importantly, they are present when he demands this reassurance. He refuses to acknowledge them as children of his genetic material but expects them to fulfil their daughterly role. It is not surprising, then, that this affects Nora and Dora significantly. Forced to mother their estranged father from a distance; working with him, socialising with him, and supporting him, all while being denied anything from him.

‘I may never have known my father in the sense of an intimate acquaintance, but I knew who he was. I was a wise child, wasn't I?’

When Wise Children was released in 1991, this was a revolutionary stance - that the Father and his actions can affect the child and how they turn out. It is only a recent development that fathers play an essential role in their child's life. For so long, under the pretext of the so-called nuclear family, where the father’s role was to go out to work and earn money, it meant that, for many years, mothers were considered the main focus in the child's life that they solely affect the physical, emotional and spiritual wellbeing of the offspring. As a result, fathers have been omitted from this equation until recently, when we bid farewell to the so-called nuclear family and welcomed more diverse definitions of what family is. With blended, adopted and single-parent households, the definition grows constantly to reflect what a brilliantly broad diversity we now have in society, and as a result, we are starting to consider what role all parents play in the child's life.

Recent research has shown how a father influences his daughter's life, intentionally or not. His actions can shape her self-esteem, self-image, confidence, and opinions of men. How he behaves and reacts to her will determine her ability to trust, her response to approval, and her belief system. It even affects her approach to love.

Each sister, as we learn, takes on a plethora of lovers - every one of them significant in their own way to the twins. Especially the first - always the first. Dora loses hers to Nora’s boyfriend following the father-goose-lover. Dora’s first lover unknowingly on his part shared between the two of them through the use of a ploy known as The Bed Trick, famously used by Shakespeare in Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well. Desperate to know what sex is like, Dora convinces Nora to let her have her boyfriend, just for one night, and so they play the classic Swap-a-Twin, decorating themselves in each other’s clothes, mimicking their hair and even swapping perfumes: a small but essential touch if they wish to pull the trick off, and they succeed - the man none the wiser that he had bedded the wrong sister, and that his actual girlfriend is outside the door, bored and waiting.

‘Our fingernails match our toenails, match our lipstick match our rouge’

If the lovers aren’t shared, then, as aforementioned, they take on a paternal role to the girls. When Dora and Nora, at seven, first see the father who abandoned them, they develop a curiosity about him, a kind of 'crush’ as they exclaim, which echoes throughout their lives and, unsurprisingly, affects their romantic entanglements. Nora loses her virginity while playing a gosling to the man who plays the father goose. In contrast, later in life, Dora embraces an older man as her lover, who later becomes one of the Great American Writers, similar to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Irish, as Dora refers to him largely throughout, is perhaps the one lover she values most of all in comparison, even if she didn’t care for him as much as he cared for her; for Dora, he was not just a lover, he provided her with the education she never really had, and for that, she will always be grateful.

‘He was a lovely man in many ways. But he kept on insisting on forgiving me when there was nothing to forgive.’

Matters of the heart and the men who influence them are significant plots for the novel, but at the end of the day, the greatest expression of love in Wise Children is not romantic or sexual but is the love between Dora and Nora. Out of the four sets of twins in the novel - Dora and Nora, Melchoir and Perry, Imogen and Saskia, Tristram and Gareth - only Dora and Nora stay together throughout each other's lives, whereas the other three pairs end up either estranged or become rivals. As Dora says: 'To tell the truth, I love [Nora] best and always have’ - they are each other's first and last relationship: life and death, Yin and Yang, extroverted and introverted. Two sides of the same coin - completing the cycle and the wish of everlasting life and love.