Book Club Guide

Nights at the Circus

by Angela Carter · 1984 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

Performance and authenticity — does it matter if Fevvers's wings are real?
The woman who owns her own spectacle — and what this costs
The end of the Victorian era and the world being born in the ruins

About this book

Sophie Fevvers, a trapeze artist who claims to have been hatched from an egg and to possess actual wings, captivates American journalist Jack Walser, who follows her from London to St Petersburg to Siberia trying to determine if she is genuine. Carter's carnivalesque novel is both a riotous adventure and a feminist meditation on spectacle, self-creation and what it means for a woman to own her own myth.

Published in 1984, Nights at the Circus won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. It is considered one of the central texts of feminist magical realism and is widely taught on A-level and university courses.

Discussion questions

Fevvers may or may not have real wings. How does Carter use this ambiguity — and what is she saying about the relationship between performance, belief and reality?
The novel is set at the turn of the 20th century and is full of symbolic women — the colonel's tiger women, Mignon, the clowns. How does Carter use this allegorical gallery?
Jack Walser's transformation across the novel is one of Carter's points. What does he lose — and gain — and what is Carter saying about the cost of encountering genuine freedom?
The novel's language is deliberately excessive — Cockney, baroque, extravagant. How does this style serve the themes — and what would a plainer prose lose?
Carter was a feminist writer who resisted simple positions. How does Nights at the Circus function as feminist fiction — and where does it resist the category?