And everything I needed to learn I found in “The Bloody Chamber”: the playfulness and generosity and friction — of ideas, in the admixture of high and low, the mythic and the realistic. Here are 10 overlapping stories about marriage and sexual awakening, decay and transformation, house cats and big cats, wolves and people who act like wolves. There are retellings of “Beauty and the Beast” and “Bluebeard.” There are counts and countesses, brides and husbands, mothers and fathers. There are only a handful of named characters, many just signifiers: Mr. Lyon and Beauty and Wolf-Alice.

My favorite story has always been “The Lady of the House of Love.” I love it for the luster of Carter’s language, its fizzing theatricality. A wholesome young soldier on the bike comes across a castle in Romania — and its inhabitant, a countess who feeds on rabbits and men. He’s stumbled into a vampire story, but is so good-hearted to remain oblivious. In fairy tales, innocence is a key that opens a door through which you can flee — without ever realizing that you were in any danger. (Experience is another key entirely.) Of course, there are worse things than vampires. The soldier gets back on his bicycle and rides off. It’s the eve of World War I. “Next day, his regiment embarked for France.” The shadow of real horror hangs over the painted backdrop of the unreal.

Carter published two books in 1979, the same year that Margaret Thatcher was elected prime minister: “The Bloody Chamber” and “The Sadeian Woman.” It was a good era for fairy tales. In the same year, Jack Zipes’s “Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales” came out. Bruno Bettelheim’s “The Uses of Enchantment” had been published in 1976; Anne Sexton’s poetry collection “Transformations” in 1971. Stith Thompson had translated Antti Aarne’s tale-type index, which grouped stories together by motif. Carter herself would later put together two anthologies of folk and fairy tales: “Old Wives’ Fairy Tale Book” and “Strange Things Sometimes Still Happen: Fairy Tales From Around the World.”

Fashion, too, took on a story­book quality: peacocky and playful and transgressive.

I found many of these stories, much later on. In the 1970s I was reading the Grimm Brothers and Perrault for the first time. I was a child and I read like a child, for pleasure and in order to figure out what the rules were, and what price you paid when you broke those rules. And again, as an adult, it seemed to me that I was breaking the rules by continuing to read and reread the things that pleased me best.

And pleasure is often subversive, Angela Carter teaches us. We are thrown off balance by delight, by terror, by beauty, by humor. And sometimes we dismiss the kind of work that evokes these responses in us, because it seems undignified, unserious, unadult. The rules above the stairs in Mr. Fox’s house tell the trespasser, “Be bold, be bold, but not too bold, lest that thy heart’s blood run cold.” But the girl goes up the stairs anyway. The girls and women in “The Bloody Chamber” remake the rules of their stories with their boldness. They know boldness is the point.