The Debutante and Other Stories - Softcover

Leonora Carrington

Softcover

ISBN 10: 099571620X ISBN 13: 9780995716209

Publisher: Silver Press, 2017

Synopsis

A debutante frees a hyena from the zoo so that it might take her place at her coming-out ball; an artist paints a portrait of a man s dead wife, but finds she has painted herself instead; a woman makes love to a boar underneath a mountain of cats; a chicken is roasted with the brains and livers of thrushes, truffles, crushed sweet almonds, rose conserve and drops of divine liqueur; two noble sisters wonder whether anybody can be a person of quality if they wash away their ghosts with common sense ; a psychoanalyst must decide what to do with the gift of a team of Russian rats trained to operate on humans.

In this first complete edition of Leonora Carrington's short stories, written throughout her life from her early years in Surrealist Paris to her late period in Dirty War-era Mexico City, the world is by turns subversive, funny, sly, wise and disarming.

With an Introduction by Sheila Heti and an Afterword by Marina Warner

About this title

Review:

"Leonora Carrington has unswervingly followed the intensity of her own particular vision and way of being... Her work bristles with a fierce, unconventional brand of feminism; anger gives it its final edge of irony and power. " --Angela Carter

"Reading Leonora Carrington liberates us from the miserable reality of our days. " --Luis Buñuel

"Leonora Carrington is so inspiring . . . I love her freedom, her humour and how her work invents its own laws. What specifically do I take from her? Her wig." --Björk

About the Author:

Leonora Carrington (1917 2011) was born in Clayton-le-Woods, Lancashire, the second of four children. Her mother, Marie Humphreys, née Moorhead, a great beauty, was Irish by birth; her father, Harold Carrington, had made a fortune in artificial textiles. Carrington was brought up at Crookhey Hall, a turreted grey stone mansion, in her mother s Catholic faith, and sent away to convent schools, from which she was repeatedly expelled. After being finished in Florence, she acceded to her parents wish that she become debutante in the 1936 season. A ball was held at the Ritz in her honour and she learned, to her outrage, that women weren't allowed to place their own bets at Ascot. (She read Eyeless in Gaza there instead.) Carrington studied painting in London, against her father s initial objections: first at Chelsea School of Art and then at the Amédée Ozenfant school, where she began to develop her exacting style. At a dinner party given by fellow student Ursula Goldfinger in 1937, she met the artist Max Ernst, with whom she went to live in Paris, though as she later put it: I ran away to Paris. Not with Max. Alone. In Paris, Carrington began writing stories, in French, and publishing them privately, illustrated with her own drawings or etchings by Ernst. The couple moved to the village of St-Martin d'Ardèche in 1938, in part to to avoid Ernst's wife, Marie-Berthe. When war broke out, Ernst was arrested and interned as an enemy alien. Carrington, aged 22, suffered a breakdown and - after fleeing to Spain - was held in an asylum in Madrid, where she underwent electroconvulsive therapy and was given the drug Cardiazol, which induced fits. She described the experience in her memoir, Down Below (1944). Released into the care of her nanny, Carrington - who had no intention of returning to England - escaped from her in Lisbon and took refuge in the Mexican Embassy. A marriage of convenience to the Mexican diplomat and poet Renato Leduc, a friend of Picasso, allowed her to travel on to New York, and then to Mexico City, where she arrived in 1943. In Mexico, Carrington joined a surrealist circle which included Octavio Paz, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo as well as Remedios Varo, a fellow émigré, who became her closest friend and collaborator. She married the Hungarian photographer Imre (Chiki) Weisz in 1946. Their first son, Gabriel, was born in 1947, followed soon after by Pablo. Her short stories, many autobiographical, were published in several collections. Like her paintings they contain references to strange creatures, alchemical rituals and human folly. She also wrote several plays. Much of her work both painted and written was influenced by her reading of Carl Jung, whom she had met before the war, and later by her study of Buddhism. Most of all, the pantheistic mythologies and visions generally condemned by Orthodox Christianity continued to inform her work, just as they had her rebellious imagination as a young girl. Politically active in the causes of human rights and women's rights, Carrington left Mexico for a year in 1968 in protest at the Tlatelolco massacre, where the military police shot hundreds of demonstrating students. In 1973, she designed a poster for the Mexican women s liberation movement, of which she was a co-founder. Her best-known written work, the novel The Hearing Trumpet, was published in 1974. In recent decades, her both her stories and artworks have received renewed prominence and appreciation. She died on 25 May 2011 in Mexico City and is buried in the British cemetery there.

About this edition

• Publisher: Silver Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 099571620X
• ISBN 13: 9780995716209
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 168