The Romance and Heartbreak of Writing in a Language Not Your Own: On Leonora Carrington Posted by parulsehgal 0 By Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Book Review, June 2, 2017 As a child, Leonora Carrington — painter, fabulist, incorrigible eccentric — developed the disconcerting ability to write backward with her left hand while writing forward with her right. This trick did not go over well with English convent school nuns. Between the world wars, Carrington was thrown out of one school after another for persistently odd behavior. When she came of age, she fled England — and her family’s fortune — for France and the Surrealists, for a life crammed with incident and adventure, occasional poverty and steady productivity. She died in Mexico City in 2011, at the age of 94, leaving behind paintings and stories full of strange, spectral charm, in which women undress down to their skeletons and a sociable hyena might venture out to a debutante ball, wearing the face of a murdered maid. Read more Share this:EmailFacebookTwitterPrintRedditMoreLinkedInLike this:Like Loading... Related