Author of The Company of Wolves explored myth and legend in work published in south London school magazine in 1950s
There is a minotaur crying with a dreary voice, a ship with death-black sails, chanting priests of Amon-Ra and a nativity tale with a quietly sceptical twist.
Unpublished work by Angela Carter, the celebrated feminist novelist who died 20 years ago, has been discovered in old copies of her school magazine.
The cache of poetry shows how even as an adolescent she was reshaping myths for her own purposes.
Carter, famous for The Company of Wolves – her retelling of Little Red Riding Hood – attended Streatham and Clapham high school in south London, where the works were found in a search of the archive. The novelist died in her literary prime, in 1992, aged 51, leaving fans craving more of her work.
A search made at the request of her biographer has uncovered three poems and two pieces of prose published in the school magazine when she was a teenager in the 1950s.
Earlier this term, the school's librarian, Sue Nichols, found a poem inspired by ancient Egypt written by Carter when she was 12. The Valley of Kings appeared in an issue of the magazine dated July 1952, along with a piece of prose, a Hot Day by the River.
Another poem, The Inn-Keeper's Child, was dated July 1953. Nichols also discovered Sacrifice to the Minotaur from July 1954 and a piece of writing in French, Chez Monsieur Noë, dated July 1955. All of the writing is signed Angela Stalker, Carter's maiden name.
In July 1957, when she was in the school's sixth form, there is an acknowledgment of a piece entitled Fable, but this does not appear to have been published. Carter attended the private girls' school before going to Bristol University to study English.
Nichols, who works as the school's archivist in her spare time, said Carter's authorised biographer, Edmund Gordon, had originally asked about a prize-winning essay.
"That must have been in junior school," the librarian said. "I didn't find any trace of that. I started with our magazine – we've got all the bound copies. That's the only place really to look as we wouldn't have kept classwork.
"I went through the whole lot, in a couple of days. It was great finding them. It was really exciting to see someone's original work like that, and see the themes beginning to come through of her later work. It's nice to know one of our girls did that."
The earliest poem, The Valley of Kings, has a note indicating that the author is in Upper IIIa. With echoes of Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ozymandias, it ends with the lines:
Thebes is dead, its temples dead
No more do beggars crave
A little food, or money maybe
All is silent in the grave
In the tombs so far away
Ancient kings long vigil keep
'Til the last bright day is ended
And all the Earth shall sleep
The last of the poems, the Inn-Keeper's Child, has a Christmas theme, with references to a "heavenly hand" and the three kings' gifts of the gold, frankincense and myrrh. It ends on a note of doubt:
The wise men say the Lord sent Him
That he is nursed by seraphim
That though he sleeps among the kine
He will save your life and mine –
I think I see
Gordon said that while the poetry and prose "don't really cut it" as works of literature, they offered a valuable insight into Carter's development.
Gordon, whose book is due to be published in 2015, said: "They are written by a very young girl. There are elements of her later work that can be discerned in them. That's obviously looking at them with hindsight. What is fascinating is what it shows about her interests and ambition at that age – it suggests she already hoped to become a writer."
Gordon added that the work showed an interest in ancient history and in non-realist narrative, "which is precisely what she went on to do".
He said: "They're less interesting from a literary critical than from a biographical point of view. The myths and mythical landscape that they deal in are different to those she later dealt in. They're myths of the classical world rather than fairytale."
Susannah Clapp, Carter's friend and the author of the memoir A Card from Angela Carter, said she was pleased that the discovery had been made.
"I'm surprised, too. I didn't know Angela had written for the school magazine. The only early story she ever mentioned to me was Tom Cat Goes to Market, written when she was six, and eventually thrown away by her mother.
"After her death, I realised she had also written poems – some were published in little magazines, others are in her journals – and these do strikingly prefigure her later work.
"The correspondences between these school pieces, which are clearly juvenilia, and her published books are less evident – but of course that has its own interest. I'll leave it to Edmund Gordon to weigh their significance in his biography."
A verse from Sacrifice to the Minotaur
Darker than death, the swan-like galley plying
To the tune of wavelets, slapping her side and sighing
She hastens to the island, far away
Where towers and mountain-tops are stained with day
And the voice of the Minotaur is drearily crying
Credited to Angela Stalker, Upper IVa