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Wise Children
by Angela Carter
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In their heyday on the vaudeville stages of the early twentieth century, Dora Chance and her twin sister, Nora -- unacknowledged the daughters of Sir Melchior Hazard, the greatest Shakespearean actor of his day -- were known as the Lucky Chances, with private lives as colorful and erratic as their careers. But now, at the age of 75, Dora is typing up their life story, and it is a tale indeed the Angela Carter tells. A writer known for the richness of her imagination and wit as well as her feminist insights into matters large and small, she created in Wise Children an effervescent family saga that manages to celebrate the lore and magic of show business while also exploring the connections between parent and child, the transitory and the immortal, authenticity and falsehood.
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"Singletons are always instrumentalizing twins, for aesthetic and philosophical purposes, and also for entertainment and money. If people are going to exploit you, why not exploit the opportunity? That’s what twin chorus girls, Dora and Nora Chance, do in Carter’s bawdy carnival of a novel. Illegitimate daughters of a great Shakespearian actor, himself a twin, the Chance sisters monetize their twinhood at the lower levels of London’s theatrical community and have a grand old time doing it. As the novel progresses, the apparently binary distinctions between high and low class, and Shakespeare and burlesque, increasingly blur. The whole thing is hugely entertaining, but what I love most about this wonderful novel is the unsentimental picture it paints of a strong, intimate twinship. Our culture tends to laud romance over siblinghood, but throughout the Elizabethan twists and turns of their family history, the one thing Dora and Nora always have is each other. It’s enough to raise some big philosophical questions about what true love looks like and enough to make a singleton weep."