What is Fevvers's first name in Nights at the Circus?

Fevvers’s first name in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus is Sophie.

The character is christened Sophie Fevvers, though she is almost always known by her flamboyant surname and stage persona. She presents herself as a winged aerialiste: a six-foot-two Cockney performer who claims to have hatched from an egg and grown real wings at puberty. Whether her story is literally true remains one of the novel’s central questions.

At the start of the 1984 novel, the American journalist Jack Walser interviews Fevvers in her London dressing room. Her theatrical self-invention, extravagant speech and uncertain biography make her both a celebrity and an unreliable narrator. She later persuades Walser to join the circus, turning his attempt to investigate her into an immersion in her world.

Dora, Mignon and Lizzie are not Fevvers’s first name. Lizzie is her adoptive mother and companion, while the novel’s cast includes several other performers and associates who can create confusion in memory. Fevvers’s name also echoes “fevers,” reinforcing Carter’s interest in excess, performance and transformation. The novel won the 1984 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.