Award-winning storytellers Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot’s full-color graphic novel Armed with Madness presents a new perspective on the 1930s Paris art scene from neglected artist, feminist icon, and influential surrealist Leonora Carrington. Reluctant muse and feminist champion—heiress, rebel, refugee—and perhaps the last of the great surrealist artists, Leonora Carrington played many roles in her long and extraordinary life. Exchanging her privileged upbringing in prewar England for the more exciting elite of Paris’s 1930s avant-garde, she comes to rub shoulders (and more) with the likes of Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, and Salvador Dalí after embarking on a complicated love affair with Max Ernst. But the demons that have both haunted and inspired her work are gathering, and when the world goes mad with the outbreak of war and the Nazi invasion, Leonora’s own hold on reality collapses into a terrifying psychotic episode of her own. Eventually fleeing war-torn Europe, she emerges into a new and richly creative life in Mexico City, establishing herself as a prodigious painter, writer, and advocate of women’s rights. Armed with Madness, from the acclaimed partnership of Mary and Bryan Talbot, celebrates the life and career of a truly remarkable artist and woman.
Author
Dr Mary Talbot is the author of the graphic novel Dotter of her Father’s Eyes (Jonathan Cape 2012), illustrated by her husband, award winning comic artist Bryan Talbot. She is an internationally acclaimed scholar who has published widely on language, gender and power, particularly in relation to media and consumer culture. Dotter is the first work she has undertaken in the graphic novel format. It went on to win the Costa Biography Award in January 2013. Mary’s recent academic work includes a second edition of Language and Gender (Polity 2010), a book that continues to be popular with university lecturers and students worldwide. However, she’s probably still best known for her critical investigation of the “synthetic sisterhood” offered by teen magazines. She has held academic posts in higher education for over twenty-five years, mostly in England, but also in Wales and Denmark. In 2004 she was invited as Visiting Professor to Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, China. She has also done extensive consultancy work, including for the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Quality Assurance Agency. Born in Wigan in 1954, Mary married Bryan and moved to Preston in 1972, where she brought up two sons, wrote poetry and short stories. She studied English Literature and Linguistics at Preston Polytechnic as a mature student, graduating in 1982 with a first class BA in Combined Studies. She later went on to study at Lancaster University, completing with a PhD on Critical Discourse Analysis in 1990. Employment as Reader in Language and Culture took her to Sunderland in 1997. She still lives in Sunderland, but has been a freelance writer since 2009. Her second graphic novel, Sally Heathcote, Suffragette, is illustrated by Kate Charlesworth and Bryan and due for publication by Jonathan Cape in May 2014. It follows the fortunes of a maid-of-all-work as she is swept up the feminist activism of Edwardian England.
