Down Below

Leonora Carrington is perhaps the most enchanting of the women Surrealists. Thedaughter of Anglo Irish privilege, she broke free of her manor-house upbringingand fled, first to art school, and then to the Continent. Though she is best knownas a painter of the gothic fantastic, with a cult following and one-woman shows atmuseums around the world, her writing is no less striking. Down Belowdescribesthe events of 1940, when, after her longtime lover, artist Max Ernst was sent toa concentration camp, Carrington was "led across the border of Knowledge" andimprisoned in a sanatorium for the insane. This powerful testament, reminiscent ofCarrington's great novel The Hearing Trumpet, ranks with the work of Sylvia Plathand Janet Frame in its raw evocation of madness.