A handful of books have been written about Carrington’s oeuvre in the context of her life. The most comprehensive is Susan Aberth’s Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, alchemy and art (2010). The Mexican Museum’s Leonora Carrington: The Mexican years, 1943–1985 (1991) runs along similar lines and has an extended interview with Carrington by Paul De Angelis. The closest to a full biography was written by a close friend of Carrington’s, Elena Poniatowska, a journalist and important figure in Mexican arts and culture, but Poniatowska’s Leonora (2011) is a fictionalised version of Carrington’s life.

Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst during their stay in Cornwall in the summer of 1937 (from book)

In 2006, at a garden party, Joanna Moorhead, a British journalist, discovered that her cousin Leonora, the black sheep of the family, was a major player in twentieth-century Surrealism. Moorhead hastened to Mexico, Carrington’s adopted country, to reconnect with her long-lost relation. One of the most fascinating aspects of The Surrealist Life of Leonora Carrington is Moorhead’s insider perspective; tellingly, she refers to Carrington as ‘Leonora’ throughout the book.

The text negotiates a fine line between biography and memoir, as Moorhead tells the tale of how she set out to meet and befriend her cousin, and interweaves this with the broader narrative of Carrington’s life. Moorhead recounts interesting, little-known details about Carrington. There are, for example, the Carringtons’ family dynamics, their desperate wish to be accepted by the British aristocracy (despite their wealth, they were socially ostracised as parvenus). Wonderful instances of Carrington’s indomitable character surface often: the most piercing memory of Carrington’s début at court was her tiara, which she couldn’t wait to take off because it kept ‘biting into her skull’. In Paris, when Joan Miró gave Carrington a handful of change to buy him some cigarettes, she gave the money back and told him to get them himself. Carrington’s second marriage to the Hungarian photographer Emerico Weisz is on the public record, but not so her affair with Octavio Paz, who wrote a poem about her. There are also interesting coincidences. When she and Leduc were stranded in Lisbon, waiting for a ship to take them to the United States, Ian Fleming was also there in the city crawling with spies and double agents that served as the inspiration for his first novel, Casino Royale.

Leonora Carrington, Self-portrait, ca.1937 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Wikimedia Commons)

Moorhead’s account of Carrington’s life shows how the artist lived Surrealism rather than subscribed to it; how Surrealism provided an outlet for a view of the world that was intrinsically hers. Carrington’s relocation to Mexico, which Breton famously described as ‘the Surrealist place, par excellence’, seemed to have nurtured something in Carrington that had been planted much earlier, through the folklore of her mother’s Irish heritage, which was not too dissimilar from the magical imagination of Mexican culture. Moorhead mentions that Carrington once said she had never tried to be a Surrealist. ‘Of course she hadn’t,’ Moorhead reflects, ‘she didn’t have to try.’