In Leonora Carrington’s first major painting Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse), completed in 1938 at the age of just twenty-one, the artist sits on a chair in the foreground, her long mane of hair floating wildly around her face. Above her, a white rocking horse hangs suspended on the wall, a stark contrast to the near-identically-posed horse galloping freely outside the window. Carrington was fascinated with horses throughout her life as a symbol of freedom and liberation; her play Pénélope centers on a young girl who falls in love with her rocking horse Tartarus. In the painting, her right hand is outstretched toward a prancing hyena, an unexpected intrusion of the wild into domestic space. Both the woman and the animal gaze intensely at the viewer, early precursors of the surreal bestial imagery that will recur throughout her fiction.
Carrington’s painting has received renewed attention in recent years; Inn of the Dawn Horse was the featured image of the Tate Modern’s 2022 Surrealism Beyond Borders exhibition, and her artistic legacy and feminist activism has undergone a contemporary critical recovery after languishing in the shadow of her older lover, the German Surrealist Max Ernst. Still, her prolific collection of fiction, which expands the themes explored in her visual art, remains underrecognized. New York Review Books has sought to rectify this situation in recent years, reissuing Down Below, the memoir of her confinement in a Spanish mental institution during World War II, her cult classic novel The Hearing Trumpet, a collection of her complete stories, and a collection of children’s fiction, The Milk of Dreams. The latest Carrington reprint, The Stone Door (July 2025) will be followed in October by Opus Siniestrus, a volume of selected plays. Of this wide-ranging oeuvre, The Stone Door is perhaps the most puzzling and difficult to classify. Long out of print, it originally appeared in French translation as La porte de pierre by Editions Flammarion in 1976 before being published in English by St. Martin’s Press in 1977. An intricate “puzzle box” of a novel, it merges Carrington’s interest in spirituality, gender, and Surrealism to tell an allegorical tale of the marriage between her and her second husband, the Hungarian photographer Emerico “Chiki” Weisz. The spiritually charged union between the two characters at the end of the novel represents her vision of the unification of male and female as a means of liberating humanity.
Born in 1917 into a family of wealthy industrialists, Carrington became interested in storytelling because of the folk tales by her Irish nanny during her upbringing at Crookhey Hall in Lancashire, England. She rebelled against the expectations of her family by studying art in London and later Paris. It’s easy to envision Carrington’s wit and boldness in a scene in The Hearing Trumpet when the teenage protagonist Marian argues “I want to paint nude models. You can’t get nude models here,” and her mother responds “with a flash of logic”: “Why not? People are nude everywhere if they haven’t got any clothes on.” In 1936, nineteen-year-old Carrington met forty-five-year-old Ernst at a party in London. The two artists soon moved to Paris, where Ernst separated from his wife and Carrington enjoyed an especially productive artistic period, painting, sculpting, and writing numerous short stories. With the outbreak of World War II, however, Ernst was first arrested by the Gestapo for producing “degenerate” art, and then managed to flee to the United States, where he married his patron Peggy Guggenheim. After her subsequent mental breakdown and institutionalization in Spain, Carrington immigrated to Mexico, where she remained for most of her life. The Stone Door was written in Mexico City upon her marriage to Emerico Weisz in 1946; their son Gabriel Weisz Carrington provides an introduction to this edition.
Like much of Carrington’s work, The Stone Door has been widely misunderstood by her readers. Upon the book’s initial publication in English in 1977, a critic for Kirkus Reviews dismissed the novella as a “surreal fantasy of exasperating self-importance, only occasionally redeemed by a flash of wit or pungency… Despite much portentous manipulation of lofty symbols, this is an extraordinarily vapid and tedious exercise.” In 2013, Tobias Carroll wrote in The Paris Review that “the disjointed narrative renders this one of Carrington’s less accessible works… this is one of the few places where one of Carrington’s narratives is unable to bear the weight of the accumulated history, myth, and philosophy in its allusions.” Now that Carrington’s body of work has been made more widely available and received increased critical attention, the complexity of the text should be reconsidered. Indeed, The Stone Door can initially seem puzzling and inaccessible; its intricate web of allusions, symbolism, and intertwined narrative threads can make it difficult to unravel its greater meaning. As the plot progresses, however, these seemingly disjointed narrative strands coalesce to form the story of the opening of the stone door and a metaphorical journey between one world and the next.
The Stone Door interweaves the disparate narratives of an unnamed woman in Mexico City and a young man named Zacharias in Budapest, figures representing Carrington and Weisz. The plot culminates with their preordained encounter, but for much of the novel the characters meet only in dreams, symbolizing the psychic connection between the lovers. The novel opens with a scene of three men, like the three fates or three witches in Macbeth, whose meeting sets the stage for the rest of the unfurling action. The men sit “silently in the observatory” in “the middle of a deep forest,” armed with a telescope, a microscope, and a flower. They appear to control the universe and they especially fear the rise of female power: one declares that “No woman must ever learn more than the circle around her hearth.” They conclude that the womb, representing a door to female knowledge, poses a threat to patriarchal control. The opening of this door is predicted to bring “Sweet chaos, and out of that chaos a new chaotic order never before dreamed by man.”
Over the course of the novel, the plot transitions between several characters whose stories are gradually interweaved. Carrington first introduces a woman named Amagoya who lives in what appears to be Mexico City and is reading the diary of an unknown woman; both women bear many similarities with Carrington herself. The narrative framework of the novel is further distorted through a series of dream sequences in which the diarist imagines herself in Mesopotamia searching for “the wise King of all the Jews” and “the stone door of Kescke.” In the “real world” of the novel, Amagoya encounters the three sages from the first chapter, one of whom is demonstrated to be the “King of the Jews.” Just as these narrative threads begin to meet, however, Carrington introduces a scene of a couple preparing dinner, where a man named Philip recounts a mysterious dream he had to a woman named Michelle. The final section of the novel centers on Zacharias, a young boy who, like Weisz, comes of age in a hierarchical boarding school in Budapest. Zacharias becomes determined to become the new Böles Kilary (Hungarian for “wise king”) and fulfill the mission of opening the stone door. Setting off on this journey, he encounters the body of the old Böles Kilary, which he attempts to return via the stone door to the land of the dead where the unnamed female protagonist is imprisoned. The novel ends with a fable-like tale in which Zacharias sews a pair of trousers for a giant out of the skin of the deceased king, before sailing into the mountain and unlocking the stone door with a musical pipe. One of the diarist’s dreams earlier in the narrative depicts the pipe being uncovered from the ground, connecting the disparate lives of these characters across time and space.
What should we make of this short yet complex novel, dense with allusions to the Zodiac, the Kabbalah, Greek mythology, and both ancient and modern history? One of Carrington’s enduring thematic preoccupations is with the underworld: “I am lost forever in the country of the dead,” concludes the anonymous woman’s diary entries. Indeed, The Stone Door blurs boundaries of all kinds: between male and female, humans and animals, the world of the living and the dead, dreams and waking reality, and even the subjectivities of her different characters. Her other books, too, invite us into mysterious institutions, fantastical realms, and alternate realities. The Hearing Trumpet’s elderly protagonist Marian Leatherby is packed off to a women’s nursing home by her family, where she uncovers a vast conspiracy involving unexplained disappearances and the supernatural that eventually leads to a reshuffling of the terrestrial order. Marian looks forward to the day when “the planet is peopled with cats, werewolves, bees, and goats. We all fervently hope that this will be an improvement on humanity….” Carrington similarly opens Down Below by inviting the reader to enter the world of the mental institution, which she frames as a journey across “the border of Knowledge”:
“Exactly three years ago, I was interned in Dr. Morales’s sanatorium in Santander, Spain, Dr. Pardo, of Madrid, and the British Consul having pronounced me incurably insane. Since I fortuitously met you, whom I consider the most clear-sighted of all, I began gathering a week ago the threads which might have led me across the initial border of Knowledge. I must live through that experience all over again, because, by doing so, I believe that I may be of use to you, just as I believe that you will be of help in my journey beyond that frontier by keeping me lucid and by enabling me to put on and to take off at will the mask which will be my shield against the hostility of Conformism.”
The Stone Door expands upon these themes of crossing boundaries and breaking free of oppressive institutions by embarking on a journey across a strange and fantastical realm. It adapts both ancient and modernist motifs of the descent to the underworld explored in works such as the Greek myth of Orpheus and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, but is also informed by the recent violence of World War II. At the time Carrington wrote The Stone Door, her institutionalization and Ernst’s imprisonment by the occupying Nazi forces had occurred only a few years previously. The generational trauma of the Holocaust is also recalled in the character of Zacharias and his isolating experience at a dehumanizing institution. Like Zacharias, Weisz was a Jewish child who was sent to an orphanage at the age of four after the death of his father. He later left Hungary for Paris and was imprisoned in a concentration camp in Morocco during the war before managing to escape and migrate to Mexico. Zacharias’s triumphant escape from his boarding school and successful journey to open the stone door parallels Weisz’s own miraculous escape, restoring him his agency in the face of oppression.
The implied union of Zacharias and the female protagonist at the end of the novel represents Carrington’s attempts to overcome the dualistic nature of gender conformity. “I am hermaphrodite in love with one of my own dreams,” writes the female diarist, embodying Carrington’s belief that masculine and feminine subjectivity are “entwined at the beginning of life” and only separated due to socialization. Although we might now view this conception of two distinct genders as binary or rigid, Carrington advocates for a more fluid understanding of gender in which the characters share and inhabit each other’s identities. Anna Watz suggests that Carrington’s vision of gender and sexuality is one “that resists binary thinking—of embracing difference without allowing it to serve a dividing or categorizing purpose,” represented in the protagonists’ attempts to find each other throughout their different incarnations. Carrington’s marginalization within the male-dominated Surrealist movement inspired her not only to join the Mexican women’s liberation movement but to create her own “Surreal Family” with Weisz, composed of their two children, the photographer Kati Horna, and the painter Remedios Varos. This matriarchal structure was intended to dissolve the boundaries between artmaking and domestic life, with her patron Edward James describing Carrington’s studio as “a combined kitchen, nursery, bedroom, kennel, and junk-store.” Her creation of a feminist community is a stark contrast to the patriarchal institution Zacharias inhabits and a visionary attempt to establish an alternate artistic space apart from the misogynistic views of the male artists who dismissed her as a precocious “femme-enfant.”
Just as Marian in The Hearing Trumpet eagerly anticipates a realm “peopled with cats, werewolves, bees, and goats,” The Stone Door merges Carrington’s interest in gender fluidity with the liberating possibilities of human-animal transformation. The result is a multifaceted hybrid text that draws on and expands some of the most striking surreal imagery from her paintings. Amagoya is “haunted by a legion of ancestral horses from the British Isles,” and the diarist imagines a green shawl as imitating “the contours of a horse, a green silk horse, a horse hiding under my shawl.” Here, the feminine image of the shawl suggests that the horse is attempting to break free of prescribed gender roles, just as Carrington’s wild hair in Inn of the Dawn Horse suggests the mane of the horse running free outside. Inn of the Dawn Horse introduces imagery of women’s transformation into horses or hyenas that enables them to become agents of transformation and change, but Carrington returns to this theme throughout her later fiction. In her short story “The Seventh Horse,” for example, the female protagonist is not only half-human, half-horse, but is able to alter the corporeality of others. Dissolving the boundaries between humans and animals just as she does between genders, Carrington envisions this inter-species unity as a key to liberation. What animal is more fitting than the horse to symbolize the freedom Carrington discovered in Mexico City and represent her trailblazing vision for a different world?
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Much like the transformative journey at its heart, The Stone Door embodies a transition from one artistic phase of Carrington’s life to the next. Having fled the war in Europe, the Spanish asylum, and her relationship with Ernst, her marriage to Weisz and move to Mexico City marked a profoundly generative turning point in both her personal life and career. The novel’s themes were influenced by her close friendship with the Spanish Surrealist painter Remedios Varo after both women immigrated from Paris to Mexico City; together, they studied alchemy, the Kabbalah, and the Mayan mystical writings Popol Vuh. The two women saw each other almost daily, and Carrington said that “Remedios’s presence in Mexico changed my life.” In 1947, the year after she wrote The Stone Door, Carrington was one of the few female artists to exhibit her work at an international exhibition of Surrealism at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, which propelled her into professional success. With the exception of periods of time living in New York City in the 1960s, Carrington spent the remainder of her life in Mexico City, where in the 1970s she became involved with the Mexican women’s liberation movement. When she died at the age of 94 in Mexico City in 2011, she was one of the last surviving members of the original Surrealist movement. It is only in the decade after her death that her work has finally begun to come back into print, of which The Stone Door emerges as likely her most ambitious novel, one that synthesizes the breadth and complexity of her artistic and spiritual version.
Eliza Browning
Eliza Browning is an English PhD candidate at Princeton currently based in London. Her work has previously appeared in Chicago Review, Asymptote, Full Stop, Cambridge Review of Books, Oxford Review of Books, and Boston Art Review, among others.