According to the critic Lorna Sage, 1979 ‘was Angela Carter's annus mirabilis as a writer’. The telling event of that year was the publication of her story collection The Bloody Chamber, a book that the novelist Salman Rushdie, a few years after Carter's death, declared a ‘masterwork’ and ‘the likeliest of her works to endure’. In the context of twentieth-century fiction, it is remarkable to see such acclaim bestowed upon a volume of short stories. Perennially regarded as the lesser form, the professional writer's ‘private aside’, as Henry James called it, the short story continues to be viewed with suspicion by many readers and tolerated by publishers only on the assurance that the author will turn in a novel next time around. The Bloody Chamber was not Carter's first venture in short stories nor would it be her last (Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces had appeared in 1974 and Black Venus was to follow in 1985), but it was her most significant intervention in the form, and is now regarded as one of the most important works of British fiction to have appeared since the Second World War.

As one might expect of so celebrated a work, The Bloody Chamber draws with it a now lengthy comet's tail of scholarly criticism and commentary, ranging from narratological and anthropological studies to readings conducted through the lenses of feminist, Gothic and psychoanalytic theory.