Leonora in the Morning Light

January 1, 2021
A novel based on true events exploring the life, love, and work of surrealist painter and writer Leonora Carrington. Set against the backdrop of World War II, the novel shifts among the perspectives of Leonora; Max Ernst, her lover and fellow surrealist; and Peggy Guggenheim, the art collector and socialite. Twenty-year-old Leonora has spent her entire life rebelling against her upper-class British upbringing. When she meets Max at a dinner party, their attraction is immediate and all-consuming. Twenty-six years her senior, he brings her into his circle of artists, which includes Pablo Picasso, Andre Breton, and Salvador Dal�. Their relationship turns her into "the sort of woman her father most feared she'd become--an unmarried artist." In their home in France, the two live in bliss for a few years--painting, exploring nature, and making love--before the war tears them apart. Max, a German citizen marked as "degenerate," is put into an internment camp, then reaches out to Peggy for help escaping Europe. Peggy, who has been trying to save artists (and their artwork) from the Nazis, begins to fall in love with Max--a man she knows will never fully love her back. Carter's lyrical and poetic prose often embodies the strange, unnerving qualities of surrealism: "Light had flashed through the marrow of her bones and she'd lain as if electrocuted, ignited, having flown beyond the margins of her skin." Throughout the novel, Carter meditates beautifully on the unique difficulties of being a woman artist. Near the end, Leonora is looking at a Frida Kahlo painting when she has an anguished realization about Kahlo: "She hides nothing. To become the master, she has killed the muse. It is that simple." No longer willing to be only a muse, Leonora comes into her own. A satisfying historical novel about love, art, and war.

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March 15, 2021
Carter's deeply empathic fictionalization of a pivotal time in Leonora Carrington's dramatic life of creativity against all odds begins in 1937, when the 19-year-old mystical animal-lover, debutante, and rebel is studying art in London. When Leonora meets the famous, married, much-older surrealist artist Max Ernst, they quickly embark on an affair that severs Leonora from her wealthy father, unleashes her artistic powers and otherworldly visions, and fully and blissfully blossoms in Provence until Germany invades France. German-born and deemed a "degenerate"" artist by the Nazis, Max is sent to an internment camp, while Leonora descends into a catastrophic breakdown and is incarcerated and abused in a Spanish asylum. Steeped in the real Carrington's meticulously mysterious paintings, uncanny stories, and harrowing memoir, and equally conversant in the experiences of Ernst and his savior--generous, vulnerable, and pragmatic Peggy Guggenheim--Carter inhabits the deprivations, horrors, and anguish the separated lovers face, and Leonora's finally finding a true home in Mexico. With a tantalizing cast that includes the women artists Leonor Fini, Lee Miller, and Remedios Varo; ravishing descriptions cued by her subjects' provocative art; and her exquisite attunement to the shock and agony of war and madness, Carter has written a refulgent and deeply involving historical tale of tragic lost love, determined survival, the sanctuary of art, and the evolution of a muse into an artist of powerfully provocative feminist expression.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from April 26, 2021
Carter (Further Out than You Thought) brilliantly fictionalizes surrealist painter Leonora Carrington’s coming-of-age amid the Nazi occupation of France and her consuming affair with fellow artist Max Ernst. When the two meet in 1937 London, Leonora is a 20-year-old art student already enamored of 46-year-old Max. She chooses love and art over her family’s money, and dives into the surrealist movement. Her life in Paris and beyond is studded with famous contemporaries, including André Breton, Paul and Nusch Éluard, Leonor Fini, and Lee Miller. But as Leonora and Max establish a haven in southern France, the country falls to the Germans. The Gestapo send Max to an internment camp, leading the unmoored Leonora to flee to Madrid, where she has a breakdown. The story jumps to Lisbon and then America as European artists flee with the help of art collector Peggy Guggenheim. Through Leonora, Carter contemplates the magic of young love, the trauma of war, and the vagaries of artistic vision: “To become the master, she has killed the muse. It is that simple.” There isn’t one misstep in here.