the complete stories of leonora carrington by leonora carrington

Her opinion on this whole affair is perhaps most clearly, and cleverly, revealed in her first story in this collection-“The Debutante”-in which a young ‘deb’ sends her only friend-who just happens to be a hyena-to her ball in her place, disguised by a gown and the face of the maid they’ve killed. In time, Leonora was sent to an art school in Florence, and then a finishing school for well-to-do young ladies in Paris-from which she was also expelled-before returning to England to be presented at court and to have her own coming out ball. We know that she was born in England in 1917, that she was a rebel against the confining role of a ‘nice young women’ from a young age, that she was expelled from two Catholic boarding schools as a young girl (“I had an allergy to collaboration,” she once said on the subject), and that while being educated by governesses and tutors at home, she reportedly focused her energies on haunting her family’s “lavatory gothic” mansion trying to learn to levitate. In fact, the clear ways her stories draw on her own life only serve to further blur the lines of reality and art in her life and her work.

She had a habit of embellishing the stories she did tell with fantastical elements, or of offering multiple contradictory accounts of the events of her own life the effect is that reading about her life has the same unreal, uncanny quality as reading one of her stories. In brief: Leonora Carrington was an English-born, Mexican surrealist painter, artist, and writer she was also a deliciously difficult woman.Īt more length: We know some things about Leonora’s life, but it is shrouded in some deliberate mystery, since Leonora herself gleefully and stubbornly refused appeals to speak about her life with any kind of clarity. Leonora Carrington is one such creative luminary who is-hopefully-currently experiencing such a revival. It will surprise no one that most of these creatives are women whose stars never rose quite as high as their male contemporaries.

Not infrequently, the “reading public” will “discover” a writer or artist from the past who is so brilliant, and singular, and original, that a furor or interest and outrage results.

The complete stories of leonora carrington by leonora carrington