the complete stories of leonora carrington by leonora carrington

Whenever Carrington’s heroines are forced to pledge allegiance, they always choose the company of beasts. In “The Complete Stories” we meet a mad queen who uses squirming live sponges to wash herself a corpse that casts a circle of light in the forest and a horse-woman who lives among plants and animals because humans won’t accept her hybrid state. In both her prose and her visual art, Carrington dissolves the borders between human and inhuman, fantasy and reality, death and life. What to do about the creature’s snout? They agree to rip off the maid’s face so that the hyena can use it as a mask, “nibbled very neatly all around.” After convincing a hyena friend to take her place at a ball, she teaches the animal how to walk in heels and covers its hairy paws in elegant gloves. The teenage narrator of “The Debutante” finds aristocratic Britain repellent. The gothic fairy tales written in the following years, collected in “The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington,” offer a hint of the dark turbulence behind those eyes. A photo taken that night shows a tall, handsome girl with porcelain skin, her satin gown slithering into a puddle around her invisible feet, as if she were a marble statue forever immobilized. In 1935, the 17-year-old debutante was presented to the court of King George. She was sent to convent and finishing schools, only to escape or be expelled.

Proper behavior was expected of Leonora, whose nickname was Prim. Her family was new money, painfully aware of their tenuous place in the “Downton Abbey”-era class structure. Her short, shape-shifting stories were published in small editions that flickered in and out of print over the years, cult classics feeding generations of fabulists like Angela Carter, Aimee Bender and Kathryn Davis.Ĭarrington grew up in a grand manor house, the daughter of a self-made British textile tycoon and his Irish wife.

She spent her last six decades quietly making art and raising two sons. Perhaps this suited Carrington: she had little hunger for notoriety, no taste for epic statements a la Dos Passos or Hemingway. Instead, she’s almost invariably relegated to footnote status, as a muse to Max Ernst and the Surrealists, a marginal figure in the grand narratives of other geniuses. Painter and storyteller Leonora Carrington was the kind of wild, visionary character who ought to be emblazoned on our cultural memory.

The complete stories of leonora carrington by leonora carrington