Ithell Colquhoun

A classic travelogue exploring the meeting point of Ireland''s landscape and legends, by Britain''s foremost female surrealist painter?Colquhoun has a very beguiling pen. . . To Irish landscapes she brings a painter''s eye, writing particularly  beautifully about skies, twilights, river valleys, sea-frayed coasts and the intensive atmosphere of remote places?  ? TatlerInto the world of 1950s Ireland?a lushly green, windswept landscape studded with holy wells and the decaying country houses of a vanished ruling class?arrives Ithell Colquhoun.An occultist and a surrealist painter, Colquhoun''s travels around the island are guided by her artist''s eye and her feeling for the world beyond our own, as well as her spikily humorous view of the people she meets. We encounter faeries and pagan rituals, ruined churches and Celtic splendour, rowdy bohemians and Anglo-Irish landowners fallen on hard times, as the author carouses through Dublin and tramps the hills of Connemara in this classic travelogue.Through her unique perceptions we discover a land that is fiercely alive and compelling. It is a place where the wind cries, the stones tell old tales and the mountains watch over the roads and those who travel on them. By intuiting the eerie magic of Ireland, Colquhoun casts her own spell. She offers up a land of myth and legend, stripped of its modern signs, at the same time offering herself to the reader in this portrait of the artist as a young woman.Richly visual and full of sly wit, this is an account of Ireland as only Colquhoun could see it, a land where myth and magic meet wind and rain, and the song of the secret kingdom is heard on city streets.

'An extraordinary book... Part Gothic fantasy, part emblematic progress through a dream world... It has a gripping hallucinogenic clarity' - Snoo Wilson A trancelike feminist fable by Britain's foremost surrealist painter Calcination. Putrefaction. Exaltation. Trapped on an enchanted island ruled by her uncle, a young woman must pass through the stages of alchemical transformation to escape. He wants to conquer death by magic - and she may pay the price for his ambition. Lushly visual, rife with symbols and cries from the unconscious, Colquhoun's first novel is a surreal feminist fable, and a supreme artistic vision. Includes 'Hexentanz', a lost chapter from the original manuscript. Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe. With a new introduction by Jennifer Higgie, author of The Other Side: A Journey Into Women, Art and the Spirit World. Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988) was born in British India and brought up in the United Kingdom. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and started exhibiting her paintings in the 1930s, gaining some renown as one of the few women associated with British Surrealism. She began visiting Cornwall during the Second World War, and eventually moved there, continuing to write, paint, and pursue the study of the occult until her death. As well as her novel Goose of Hermogenes, she is the author of two travelogues, The Living Stones: Cornwall and The Crying of the Wind: Ireland, both forthcoming from Pushkin Press.

Painter Ithell Colquhoun arrives in Cornwall in the late 1940s, searching for a studio and a refuge from bombed-out London. So begins a profound lifelong relationship with Britain's westernmost county, a land surrounded by sea and steeped in myth, where the ancient Celtic past reaches into the present. Sacred and beautiful, wild and weird, Colquhoun's Cornwall is a living landscape, where every tree, standing stone and holy well is a palimpsest of folklore - and a place where everyday reality speaks to the world beyond. Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe. With a new introduction by Edward Parnell, the PEN Ackerley shortlisted author of Ghostland and The Listeners Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988) was born in British India and brought up in the United Kingdom. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and started exhibiting her paintings in the 1930s, gaining some renown as one of the few women associated with British Surrealism. She began visiting Cornwall during the Second World War, and eventually moved there, continuing to write, paint, and pursue the study of the occult until her death. As well as The Living Stones: Cornwall, she is the author of The Crying of the Wind: Ireland and the novel Goose of Hermogenes, both forthcoming from Pushkin Press.