A tender portrait of Leonora Carrington, painter, writer — and a mother who was not always there

Ever since Leonora Carrington, the last of the Surrealists, died in 2011, having made it to her 94th year with her creativity undimmed — like that other postwar English exile P.G. Wodehouse — her afterlife has reaffirmed the old maxim ‘Now that I’m dead I’m finally making a living’. Her collected short stories (as grotesquely funny and sharp as her paintings and their titles) were published on her centenary in 2017. So, too, was a biography by Joanna Moorhead which to most editors would barely have qualified as a proposal. It ran to just over 200 pages, written by a journalist who is ‘especially interested in relationships and family life’ — but didn’t discover until middle age that her second cousin was a world-famous painter. So one rather suspects Leonora of having a joke at posterity’s expense by having allowed Moorhead to listen to her life story (without notebook to hand) — akin to Wodehouse’s decision, at death’s door, to let the uninvestigative David Jansen write his biography.

An extremely private — one might even say paranoid — person, Leonora kept a lid on her creative life, her one piece of autobiographical writing being the harrowing 1945 monograph Down Below, documenting the time she spent in a Spanish asylum for the insane, put there by her father for daring to reject the society life he’d mapped out for her. Reissued in 2017, with a fine introduction by Marina Warner, it remains her most powerful prose piece.

It is perhaps fitting — it certainly would have tickled Carrington — that the only biography of her worthy of that title should have been published as Leonora: A Novel. Beautifully written by her friend Elena Poniatowska, it is the fully-rounded portrait that this giantess of a painter warranted.