The year is 1899, and something eerie is happening. Sophie Fevvers, a trapeze artist who has already taken the Continent by storm, now holds London in thrall. Her act is indeed worth catching. For Fevvers, who stands 6 ft. 2 in. tall, also boasts a pair of wings that, when spread, span 6 ft. She does not hurtle; she soars. Attracted by the publicity, an American journalist named Jack Walser thinks he may have found another subject for a series he is planning on "Great Humbugs of the World." He interviews the famed "Cockney Venus" in her dressing room after a performance. On the wall hangs a poster of the aerialiste drawn, as the subject coarsely confides, by "some Frog dwarf "; it is signed "Toujours, Toulouse." Fevvers plies the reporter with champagne and assures him, "I never docked via what you might call the normal channels, sir, oh, dear me, no; but, just like Helen of Troy, was hatched."
The union of Leda and the swan (a.k.a. Zeus) once caused mankind some problems, including the Trojan War. If Fevvers is truly a second coming, what upheavals lie in wait for the imminent 20th century? Author Angela Carter, 44, keeps this question twirling throughout Nights at the Circus, her eighth novel. Answers dangle out of reach. But Carter's brand of fanciful and * sometimes kinky feminism, already heralded in her native England and gaining admirers in the U.S., has never been more thoroughly or entertainingly on display.
The autobiography that Fevvers tells to the skeptical Walser is, except for the business about the wings, standard 19th century melodrama. It begins with the heroine abandoned in a basket on the steps of a London brothel. A Cockney prostitute, noticing the downy lumps on the infant's shoulders, accidentally gives the foundling a surname: "Looks like the little thing's going to sprout Fevvers." Years pass, and the child earns her innocent keep about the house by posing as Cupid in the drawing room, while commercial sex flourishes around her. Then comes puberty and the improbable onset of pinions. With the help of Lizzie, a retired whore and her adopted mother, Fevvers learns to extend her new appendages and fly. The one-eyed madam, who is nicknamed Nelson and wears the full uniform of an admiral of the fleet, witnesses the maiden voyage and exclaims: "Oh, my little one, I think you must be the pure child of the century that just now is waiting in the wings, the New Age in which no women will be bound down to the ground."
Walser does not quite believe Fevvers' confession, and rightly so. Most of its details are incredible. Buffeted by cruel fate, the bird-girl sinks to enforced servitude in the establishment of one Madame Schreck, who runs a particularly nasty pornographic peep show. Fevvers, by now known throughout the London demimonde as the Virgin Whore, plays the Angel of Death in erotic tableaux. Hearing that her mistress has sold her services for a trifle, the rara avis explodes: "What, 50 rotten guineas for the only fully feathered intacta in the entire history of the world? Call yourself a procuress?"