Found Object No.0035.26 New York City, Night at the Circus by Angela Carter

Nights at the Circus — Angela Carter (1984)

1985 first American edition.

In 1899, Sophie Fevvers, a flamboyant aerialist who claims to have been hatched from an egg and possesses enormous wings, has become the toast of Europe. When an American journalist sets out to expose her as a fraud, he is drawn into a delirious world of circus performers, brothels, escaped prisoners, and impossible transformations. From London to St. Petersburg and the Siberian wilderness, Carter constructs a riotous, seductive novel about female freedom, the invention of identity, and the intoxicating power of storytelling. At its heart lies one irresistible question: Is Fevvers a woman pretending to be a bird, or a bird pretending to be a woman?

Carter's novel won the 1984 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. Its winged heroine was inspired in part by the mythological figure of the bird-woman, while the novel's exuberant blend of fairy tale, feminism, and Victorian spectacle helped establish it as one of Carter's defining works.